


Motion Picture Soundtrack

by Young_Rouge_Rose



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Adventure & Romance, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Humor, Anxiety, Blood and Gore, Depression, Drama, Fate & Destiny, Film maker Phil Lester, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Humor, Getting Back Together, Getting Together, Getting to Know Each Other, Hurt/Comfort, Lawyer Dan Howell, M/M, Magical Realism, Mild Smut, Mutual Pining, Non-Linear Narrative, Original Character(s), Pianist Dan Howell, Secrets, Slow Burn, Social Anxiety, Strangers, Strangers to Lovers, Timeline What Timeline
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-03-09 16:57:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 69,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13485822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Young_Rouge_Rose/pseuds/Young_Rouge_Rose
Summary: 'Maybe fate is like a magnet. Everyone talks about how magnets attract but they also repel. Maybe we are so much of the same stuff we keep pushing each other away instead of holding each other close'.Daniel James Howell is a lawyer and a music lover, an unhappy one. He has a distinct plan of where he will be five years from now. Philip Michael Lester was not included in this plan and yet in five years, he moves from an unknown stranger to a permanent fixture in Dan's life. He is an indie-horror movie director and Buffy enthusiast. Wherever he goes strange things seem to follow. With Phil, all chances of normality are blown out of the water and for once Dan can't bring himself to care. He is too caught up in books, bears, three-legged cats, and motion picture soundtracks.





	1. Prologue

_“There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.”_

_-Chuck Palahniuk_

The building holds its breath, then exhales. The walls shrink into themselves as the chilly London air breathes down its wooden neck. The foundations sway ever so slightly in the breeze. It is an old building, as all buildings are in London. It is a mishmash, mosaic of new and old. Old foundations feeding into new electrical cables. The projector at the receiving end of this new electrical cable sputters to life and paints the old walls red.

There are two boys lying side by side in a king-sized bed with the space of four European countries between them.  The building goes back to holding its breath.

Daniel James Howell was avoiding thinking about death by occupying his mind with other thoughts. Dan was thinking about music and how everyone’s favourite songs were just a different combination of notes. He was thinking about how many times musicians failed, how many wrong combinations would go unheard. He was thinking about how strange it was that two or more notes could blend together so seamlessly, as though the two pitches were born to be played together.

Dan was thinking about fate, the universe and cosmic mumbo-jumbo. He was wondering if atoms worked like notes. He was wondering if, since people were nothing but atoms and if atoms did work like notes then it was possible two people could be made of atoms that fit together like good music was made of notes that sang in tune.

Dan was thinking about knowing and not knowing. He was wondering which one was worse. Which one was better. He was wondering if you could ever unknow something. You could always finish a book, then start it right over again but you could never read it again for the first time.

Dan was thinking about point A and point B. He was trying to pinpoint that if this moment, this dark room was point B- when had point A began? When had he reached the point of no return?

Dan was thinking about soundtracks. He was thinking about how the order they were written in, wasn’t always the way they were presented. They were snuggled between similar sounds written at different times, picked in meticulous ways. If he were trying to tell how he got from point A, to point B he might have to take a few detours. Snuggle times beside each other where they best fit.

Similarly, Philip Michael Lester was thinking about scenes in films. He was thinking about how they were recorded at different times, on different days and still, they were stitched together in some kind of cohesive manner. He was thinking about telling and not telling and if things would change. He was thinking books, bears, three-legged cats, cross-continental trips and motion picture soundtracks.

Both boys were thinking of the past five years.            


	2. The Mundane, Monday Morning

**_Act 1_ **

**_Year 1 – January_ **

_A three-legged cat was hobbling after a flock of pigeons through the streets of early morning London. His fur was black and matted, his tail banged and stout. He had no name now. Once he did. At first, he had been the young and fetching, four-legged kitten owned by a rich and slightly aristocratic family.  He had been called Sir Constantine Caviar, the second. Though there had been no Constantine Caviar the first. They had left the country and in turn, left him behind._

_His second name was simply Puss. Given to him by the elderly woman who took him in and let him sleep at her feet. She had aged more quickly and less gracefully than he had and in turn, she had left him to. Then for a long while, he was a cat with no name, envious of birds but not envious of people._

_People were strange creatures, who always stayed the same. They could not change their name and were always glued to light up screens. His third owners in particular. They had given him the name he was most fond of but he was getting ahead of himself._

_This morning he chased a flock of pigeons east and stopped only when he was almost tread on by a bustling man, glued to his light up screen. His business suit floated open in the breeze._

_***_

The mundane, Monday morning crept up on Daniel James Howell in the same way that death creeps up on a sickly crone, both slowly and all at once. He swore Saturday and Sunday had gone by in the blink of an eye and that the rest of the week seemed to trudge like a three-legged ass through mud. That was one of the pitfalls of having a job that he hated. No matter how much money he made, his lacklustre job of defending criminals (both innocent and guilty) seemed to chip away at the ever-growing hole in his chest.

That morning after almost tripping in the street, he was queuing up for his daily dose of caffeine, heroin for the working-class man. If Dan had it his way he would opt for a permanent caffeine catheter tapping directly into every viable vein, but that would be a little too pricey. He was attempting to manage his budget so he could quit his shitty job as a lawyer and pursue something he genuinely loved. That was his metaphorical five-year plan.

The only pitfall of this plan was that Dan wasn’t sure what it was he genuinely loved doing. He had been unhappy so long it felt like normality, like the familiar dint in his sofa which formed perfectly to his arse. The sofa cushion had almost worn away to a state of discomfort and any sane person would have thrown it out years ago, but he was terrified that he would never find something as fitting to him as it.

When Dan finally reached the start of the line he slurred out a sleepy order from the menu and looked around for a seat. There was an even longer queue of people waiting to collect their order. He had luckily foreseen this congestion and had come an hour earlier than he needed so he could get to work on time.

Dan looked around the exterior of the café in the hopes that there would be a seat that was both spare and still held the register in his line of view for quick access and exit. It looked as though all the good seats were taken so, in the end, he sat nestled beside a strange, wooden, box-like structure. It was painted an array of reds and blues with a variety of different literary characters scattered about the exterior.  The small door in the front of the box was left slightly ajar.

Upon opening the front of the box, he was confronted with a small bookshelf, cluttered mostly with classics and beat up copies of old crime thrillers and romance novels, with men on the covers in different levels of strange and compromising positions. Dan wasn’t what you would call a patron saint of the arts, but he was almost certain whoever created the mobile library initiative was likely thinking of the ever-decreasing literacy rates of children and lowered attention spans of ‘millennials’ opposed to giving middle-aged women an excuse to read softcore porn over their morning coffee.

Dan had time to kill and a handful of barely functioning brain cells to entertain so he leafed around for something to look at, pulling out a Stephen King novel. He placed it on the table before him, noticing a warn receipt nestled between page 40 and 41. Upon closer inspection scribbled over the order of two overly complex coffees, and two red velvet cakes was an unsolved game of hangman.

_The first Stephen King book I ever read was…?_

The words were scribbled haphazardly in messy, blue ink over the body of an already hanging stick figure. Whoever had been playing mustn’t have got the right answer. Dan let his mind wander for a moment, creating a story for these two people in his head. A couple- he figured, likely on a date, probably dating for a while. Dan wondered what had gone down, imagining (slightly sadistically) a boyfriend fretting over not remembering something that was likely a small but important detail of a girlfriend’s past.

Dan imagined they might have fought. He even toyed with the idea that she had stormed off in a fit of dramatic rage, pouring the overly complex cocktail of coffee over his (likely) expensive clothes. Maybe ten years from now she would either have made up with him and have a white picket fence, a litter of dogs and maybe a kid, or maybe she would be on her way to pull some kind of Kill Bill-esc scene over him forgetting something so important to her.

Daniel James Howell was a dreamer. He liked to create stories in his head and shape moments of his life into funny anecdotes to tell on later dates to the odd handful of people he felt comfortable sharing them with. Maybe that’s where he wanted to be in five years, a dreamer- who got paid for it and still managed to have a stable living situation and maybe someone to come home to at the end of a long day. That in itself was a fucking big dream.

He looked back to the hanging stick figure, making himself a promise then and there that whatever he did, he had to do something because the thought of his life staying the same way it was now in five years made the image of the stick figure melt into a mirror of his own face. He couldn’t keep living like this.

He glanced at the several spaces still left blank under the image and pulled out a pen of his own in an attempt to solve the riddle.  

__ _ri _ti_ e_

Dan got it almost instantly.

_Christine_

Dan was midway through scribbling a crudely drawn set of car headlights on the receipt when his order number was called. He shoved the makeshift bookmark back into place and into the bookshelf before collecting his coffee and bagel breakfast.

Instead of his brain’s usual morning routine of worrying and lamenting about work, he was instead thinking over the stupid little scribbled hangman game.

***

Philip Michael Lester was often too busy falling over his large pile of unfinished projects to consider falling in love, but sometimes he still liked to entertain the idea. He wasn’t picky. So far, he just wanted to have someone near his height who shared at least some of his taste and passion towards films. Even those principles were flimsy.

The only thing he wanted at this point in time was for his ever-growing pile of unfinished projects to shrink into a slightly more manageable load. He was currently kneeling over a petite blonde woman from his eight-a.m. film study lecture. A large camera was balanced on his slim shoulders. The weight of the camera was so hefty he almost buckled before it, but with this weight he felt like Atlas, both very crushed and very important.

“Can you just tilt your head a little to the left?” He asked politely, never looking up from the viewfinder of the camera.

Phil was acutely aware that this was likely due to his slight case of social anxiety when it came to anyone but his inner circle. He was good at hiding it though, often strangers would confide in him because he hid his discomfort so well. Still, it was there- this niggling ache at the back of his mind.

He watched as the girl he thought might be named Stacy, or Susan followed his instructions. He looked up to his best friend and co-director PJ Liguori. The man was the perfect mixture of manic and magnificent. He was currently standing above Phil and Stacy or Susan, holding a water balloon filled with congealed fake blood. There was an evil glint behind the greens of his eyes that made Phil think he may have been enjoying this a little too much.

It was just the three of them, an abandoned flat complex and a couple of tones of fake blood and latex. That was guerrilla filmmaking for you. He and PJ were working on their latest horror masterpiece, _Exploding Heads: the Memoirs of a Psycho Killer._ It was a working title, and PJ’s idea. He had gone on about how it would bring in a hipster crowd with a name like that. Phil was more into the cinematography and scriptwriting. PJ could call it whatever he wanted.

“Is this good?” Stacy or Susan asked, wriggling slightly to her left, flashing Phil a smile before regaining her composure and reshaping her face into the mask of horror the script demanded.

Phil got up and fiddled with the lighting before retaking his position. He then shot her a shy smile, feeling it to be the polite thing to do.

“Yeah, you’re doing brilliant, keep it up.” His eyes returned to the viewfinder before he caught PJ giving him a look.

They had been friends since the two had first gone to university for a degree in linguistics. Both had finished the degree and drifted about with little passion for language and very little in the way of job opportunities until they both discovered the other’s love for film and arthouse horror as a genre. That led to the onslaught of half-made films in their back catalogue and the two of them returning to university to study in film.

They had known each other so long that they knew each other’s looks. PJ was teasing him silently. He didn’t have to speak for Phil to hear the other boy’s voice in his head.

‘ _Brilliant? Someone’s trying to get laid.’_

Phil rolled his eyes in his own quiet response.

‘ _She’s nice but I’m not interested, can we finish this up? This cement is doing a number on my knees.’_

_‘But she’s interested!’_ PJ’s eyes shot back instantly. Phil shook his head and subtly flipped PJ off before saying aloud,

“Okay, we’ve only got one take to do this. Make it count. PJ, drop it in three, two…”

And with that in one swift motion, PJ dropped the balloon, letting it fall and bath Stacy or Susan in a violent torrent of fake blood, her face contorting in true horror once she was covered with the stuff. It was a good shot, Phil knew it before it was over in the same way a gymnast knows they’ve stuck a landing before their feet have even touched the floor, it’s all in the setup and the setup was perfect.

 He played it back twice just in case, showing it to PJ and watching that manic smile of his return for a moment. He seemed giddy at the sight, proud. Phil knew the feeling. He wasn’t sure if it was twisted to take pride in something that looked so gruesome, but that was the point after all.

There was something visceral about horror that both the boys loved. Whether you loved horror films or hated them, they always made you feel something and seeing the vision they had storyboarded and scripted weeks before coming together now only put a fire under the two boys. PJ was ready to run home and start editing their footage together, Phil could see that already. Phil, on the other hand, felt bad at the prospect of leaving Stacy or Susan to take The Tube four stops back to her flat when she was still dripping red. After a quite self-deliberation he decided to ask her to come over to his flat to clean herself up since he only lived a few minutes away.

“I feel like cranberry sauce,” The girl giggle sitting up while smiling at the two boys before wiping the palms of her hands over PJ’s jeans and Phil’s face narrowly missing the camera.

“You look like cranberry sauce,” PJ countered with a chuckle, taking the camera from Phil and helping him and Stacy or Susan stand.

“It looks like our work here is done,” PJ beamed. They both knew that ‘done’ was a relative term, since they would probably spend the next week editing the forty-minute short film together, but it was done enough for today.

“Great, I could use a shower though before I go home or else someone may call the police.” It was as though she read Phil’s mind and PJ wasn't offering to let her go to his home (which was in the same complex as Phil’s). He felt as though he might have gotten set up.

“I’ve seen stranger things on The Tube,” He commented before inevitably offering for her to clean up at his place.

At this he watched Stacy or Susan (Phil was now beginning to feel guilty for not knowing her name) smile widely to PJ who offered her a crooked smirk and a silent, thumbs up. Phil had definitely been set up.

Philip Michael Lester still considered himself too busy to be dating, but apparently, his best friend had other ideas.

 ***

Daniel James Howell was too busy trying to find himself, script out his five-year plan, stay on top of work and find time to procrastinate to even consider having a social life but his two best friends Louise Pentland and Dorothy (Dodie) Clark seemed to disagree.

He had just entered his one-bedroom flat, dropped his bloody briefcase and was in the process of pouring himself some Ribena when a rough and rhythmic knock rattled him from his thoughts. With a small groan, he made his way back to his front door, flinging it open haphazardly and stomping back to the kitchen to sip his drink. He knew who it would be.

“Aren’t you going to tell me to come in?” Questioned a small, brunette girl. She had already removed her shoes and wasted no time following Dan into his kitchen.

“I figured you know how to let yourself in, strays tend to do that,” Dan teased as the girl, Dodie, attempted to hit his shin with her pointed feet.

“Arse hole,” she hissed.

“I came over to tell you I’m having a party Friday and you’re coming.”

“Don’t you mean I’m invited?” Dan asked as he turned his attention to her. He knew full well it was a demand.

“I mean, you’re coming. My goal in life is to make sure you don’t become a total hermit by the time you turn thirty, and that means you are required to attend. Louise is coming Dan, Louise. She has two kids and she can find the time. You _are_ coming. That is, unless you have plans.”

“Oh, I have plans,” Dan said in the vague manner of someone who didn’t have plans.  

Dodie raised a darkly pencilled brow in challenge, her arms folding over her chest. Everything about her body spoke, _try me_. So, Dan bit the bullet and attempted.

“I was planning on spending most of the evening playing video games in my underwear, beating some kids in Japan at Mario Cart, learning a new song on the piano, and maybe having some me time.” It wasn’t a lie.

“So, by ‘me time’ you mean eating pizza at two in the morning then wanking before going to bed?” Sometimes Dodie was so direct it was almost callous, but two could play at that game.

“Masticate and masturbate, that’s what I always say.” She didn’t miss a beat.

“Do that after the party then, plenty of time.”

“I just remembered I’m planning to have the flu that day actually,” Dan quipped already busy thinking of another excuse for when the first was inevitably shot down.

“It doesn’t matter, I live across the hall, not in bloody Wales. It won’t take that much effort.”

He was quiet for a moment. He wasn’t the type to like parties. He tended to spend them cradling some piss tasting wine, sitting in an unoccupied corner of the room or hovering around the snack table.

“Can I call a mental health day then?”

This caused Dodie to falter as he knew it would. She was practically an advocate for mental health awareness, constantly stating it was just as important as physical health. If there was a chink in her armour, this would be it. He could practically see the cogs ticking in her head.

It also helped that Dan’s track record with parties was murky. Nothing had been as bad as the week they didn’t speak of. It had happened the previous year. Dan had disappeared during a party and stayed missing for the better half of a week. Mentally, he had been at his lowest. He still struggled to think about that time. Dodie never brought it up. He can’t even remember what set him off. He still can’t think about that week.

“I will be there to make sure everything’s okay though and it’s just across the hall Daniel. You can come home if it’s too much. Plus, I owe you, since you have spent a bunch of parties on the bathroom floor of some bloody friend of a friend’s flat with me. Pretty please? It would mean the world to me.”

Her doe eyes swelled and Dan was caught. His jaw set. His drink forgotten. He scrubbed his face in frustration.

“Christ on a bike,” He grumbled knowing he had lost.

“That means you’ll come?” Dodie clarified already throwing her arms around his shoulders in excitement.

“That means I didn’t have a fucking choice, did I?” She pulled back slightly from the embrace, beaming widely.

“No. But I’m glad we’ve reached an agreement.”

“I bloody hate you.”

“You love me,” She gasped out in false annoyance.

“Fine- I like you… kind of,” Dan compromised as a smile began to spread across her face.

“No ro-mo,” He added just to get her geared up.

“Boys and girls can be fucking friends and say they love each other without being in a romantic relationship Dan.”

“I know, I was just saying… I love you- no ro-mo.”

Dodie Clark was a dangerous creature when pressed but she knew Dan’s teasing habits too well. She knew that blowing up in his face would mean him winning, so she shot him a tight-lipped grin and uttered,

“Love you too, no ro-mo. You little shit. But, you never know, I have a lot of single friends. Maybe you might come home to something other than your left hand… for once.”

This caused Dan to groan. Dating was pushed to the very bottom of his to-do list and he wasn’t the type of person who liked random hook-ups. He didn’t see the point. Dodie had two extremes when it came to relationships. The first of which was the state of an utter love-sick romantic and the second was accustom to a no strings attached sequence of escapades. He, on the other hand, wasn’t hyper-focused on finding an elusive other half or nightly second skin.

 “I doubt it. You’ve already tried to hook me up with every single friend you have, I think if something were going to happen, it would have happened by now.”

At his words, something seemed to spark behind her eyes, a silent revelation. She opened and closed her mouth several times as if trying to decide if whatever had sparked her interest was something she should share. He was about to ask her to spit it out when she spoke again.

“Only the girls,” To this Dan rolled his eyes.

“I’m not gay,” He instantly pointed out.

It didn’t take much soul-searching to figure this out. He had been with plenty of girls throughout his life and enjoyed them all to varying degrees. He’d had crushes on girls since he was in nappies. There was no way he was gay. It was something he had been questioned about many times, likely because most of his inner circle were women and he had never considered dating any of them but, this was an idiotic thing to base sexuality off in the first place.

“I never said you were,” Dodie pointed out a look of genuine offence painting over her face.

“I just said I’ve only tried to hook you up with my female friends, and though you’ve always sworn until you were bloody blue in the face that you aren’t gay, you’ve never said you don’t like guys. It’s not impossible to like both.”

Dan knew this too. He was used to Dodie and her late night, slightly drunken rants about bisexual erasure, since that was what she identified as and like any good friend he had listened. He had felt her frustration but he had never entertained the idea of being bisexual himself. He had never felt attraction towards a guy. Sure, he could recognise when a guy was attractive, and then there were those several dreams he had a few years back that involved Evan Peters in a variety of compromising positions but, he had been slightly drunk and waist deep in American Horror Story episodes. None of that was enough to make him question his sexuality.

“It’s not impossible to like both, but I don’t,” He assured diplomatically.

“So, you are saying you have never, ever thought about it?” Dodie asked and Dan was quiet for long enough for it to seem like hesitation.

“Oh my fucking god you have,” She exclaimed her hands clasping together in excitement.

“In that case, a whole new door of romantic opportunities has opened up. There is Tyler, Connor, Chris or… oh, I think Sarah is bringing a few plus ones and I’m sure one of them is at least bi-curious. He’s cute too, just your type. What was his name? P-Peter? Paul? I don’t know it started with a P I think… or maybe an F. Frank?”

She then began on a tangent almost impossible to follow. Dan tuned out, going back to sipping Ribena and internally groaning. He let his mind wander to ways he could avoid said party and back to the scribbled game of hangman.


	3. Revenge of the Vegan Zombies

**_Year 1 - January_ **

_The mobile library was a wooden box carved into the shape of an enclosed bookshelf. Before that, it was a tree in Germany. Inside this bookshelf was a Stephen King novel. The book was growing old now, beaten and warn. The pages in the novel were once fresh and crisp, though were now stale and yellowed. Before that, the pages were a tree in Germany._

_It was an odd kind of fate that two trees from a small German forest now rested seas away from their home and still, their corpses had somehow found one another. People always talk about fate, believing in it and not believing in it. They always think of fate as relevant to only people. As if all their atoms were somehow superior to all others. As if fate couldn’t happen in other ways._

_If the atoms of the mobile library and the Stephen King novel which were once the atoms of two trees in a forest in Germany were music notes, they would come together to sound like Brahms. The conversation happening beside them, however, had a very different tune._

_***_

“Let me check I’m getting this straight. So, she went back to your flat, had a shower, borrowed your clothes then left?” PJ asked over his gingerbread and hazelnut latte.

“I also might have shown her the first few episodes of Buffy, she said she’d never seen it before so I had to show her but, she didn’t seem that interested in it, so we talked for a bit then she went home.”

Philip Michael Lester wasn’t always as innocent as he pretended to be, but he was good at fooling most people into thinking he was. Sarah, he had learnt was the name of Stacy or Susan and it had been clear she was slightly more romantically interested in him than he had been with her.

He hated hurting people’s feelings, it was against his nature. He always saw the best in people and Sarah was a good person. She was kind and would always jump at the chance to help people. She was also slightly shy and very easy to please. The night before she had told him about how she loved animals and had been too happy for Phil to show her a copious amount of cute animal photos he had stored on his phone for a rainy day. Her attention span had begun to wain when he began to tell her all the interesting facts he had learnt about them from hours of deep diving in all the strange cracks and crevasses of the internet.

He had begun to tell her about how someone had won an Ig Nobel prize for a paper on whether cats could be defined as a liquid, opposed to a solid because of their habits to make their body almost fit seamlessly to any vase, jar or box they were placed in. She had smiled and nodded but there was the glassy sheen in her eyes of disinterest. The only reason Phil even knew about the Ig Nobel prize was because PJ sent him a link where it talked about people and their dislike to cheese. It was one of Phil’s odd quirks, his hatred of cheese, but he still found liquid cats pretty interesting.

She had liked him, that much Phil could tell. She had probably expected a lot more from going back to his flat from what he was willing to give. Phil couldn’t help but feel as though they had very little in common. She liked him, but she didn’t exactly understand him and at the end of the day, wasn’t that what everyone really wanted, to be understood?

“You are bloody frustrating, she liked you. What do you mean that’s all that happened?” PJ continued their conversation in a flurry of frustrated confusion.

“I don’t see why you’re trying to get us together in the first place. You aren’t with anyone either,” Phil quietly challenged, poking at his muffin.

“I’m married to my movies,” PJ beamed confidently, not skipping a beat. His work ethic was commendable, Phil would give him that.

“All of them?” He asked, a brow raised.

“ _Even Revenge of the Vegan Zombies Part IV?”_  

They had both agreed that was their worst work. Phil liked to look on the bright side of things but, there was little to no saving graces in that short. It was one of their first attempts at a film which was put together and filmed within the space of two days, one and a half of which PJ had been too drunk to remember and Phil had been too wide-eyed and naïve at the time to say anything. He had thought that all the mistakes made could be fixed in post.

The idea of a colony of anthropomorphic vegetables made of cardboard, paint and Sellotape cannibalising and consuming other vegetables came across as a lot more of a comedy and less of a social commentary.  It wasn’t as they had intended. Phil also wasn’t altogether sure why they decided to call it part four when there hadn’t been a part one, two or three.

“Even _Revenge of the Vegan Zombies Part IV._ It taught me what not to do, which is also important. I love that steaming pile of shit like my own fucked up child.”

PJ then commenced a long and tedious lesson of what he had learnt from their less admired work before an idea seemed to strike him silent.

He then reached down into his backpack, pulling out a pen and worn notebook, beginning the furious scribblings of a man with an idea. Phil half attempted to read the other boy’s furious scrawl and roughly drawn images, before he gave up entirely and instead leant over to examine the small, enclosed bookshelf to his right, finding the book he had been reading the previous day. He found his receipt still wedged in the centre crease of the book, pausing when he noticed an addition he didn’t remember making.

Someone had solved the game of hangman he and PJ had been playing. Phil felt a quiet smile snake onto his lips. At least someone solved it. He also smiled at the little sketch of car headlights drawn below the hanging man. He felt the overwhelming urge to add something more. He reached over, picking up a blue pen which PJ wasn’t currently using and scribble down the words,

_Congratulations random stranger! You win a haunted car and two thumbs up for a great taste in literature._

He then spent more time than he needed to, drawing an array of party balloons and firecrackers. He wasn’t Da Vinci or even a very drunk Picasso, but he hoped whoever it was would admire his efforts just the same. He knew that there was a very slim chance of whoever had added to the note seeing his addition or even caring about it. Maybe it was some old man who had run out of crossword questions. Still, Phil liked to dream.

_(Also, imagine Victory Fanfare from Final Fantasy VII playing, it makes things more epic.)_

He doubted they would get the reference but the only thing that rivalled Phil’s love of films was his love of video games and his mind was a clutter of old video game soundtracks. The song played on loop whenever Phil did anything even remotely impressive with his life and maybe, if they didn’t know about it, they might look it up and maybe it would make them smile.

The idea of this random stranger smiling suddenly cause Phil’s cheeks to heat. This was stupid, putting so much weight on one little scribbling. He quietly returned to reading the book, listening to PJ etch away at whatever idea was brewing in his mind.

***

It was another mind-numbing Tuesday in the life of Daniel James Howell. He was sleepily nursing his coffee and pistachio muffin in his arms. His briefcase was tucked under his arm and his tie was tightening around his neck giving him the slow feeling of strangulation. He was attempting to kick open the shop door leading to the outside seating area but he was having no luck. Of course, he wouldn’t.

It was then a boy around his age bounded through the door managing to smack Dan in the face, causing him to drop his briefcase, almost spill his coffee and outright crush his muffin. His day just kept getting better, so it seemed. The boy ran to the counter grabbing a worn notebook from beside it and held it up to another man.

“I knew I bloody-well left it on the counter when I brought that second coffee,” He exclaimed to the other man who had just reached the door.

The man at the door had blue eyes. The bluest of fucking blue. The kind women would write into romance novels but you never found in real life, except maybe Paul Hollywood. Dan really needed to get out more, and stop spending his late nights watching The Great British Bake-off. He sounded like a middle-aged woman, but, he digressed, they were fucking blue.

The other man looked at him with the wide-eyed look of a deer in the headlights of an oncoming car and Dan stood awkwardly, looking right back with his food clutched to his chest and the contents of his briefcase scattered about the floor.

“I’m so sorry about that,” The man gasped out awkwardly already scooping down to fumble with Dan’s papers.

Dan’s body seemed to thaw out at the other boy’s movements and he too lurched forward to gather his things. In his haste, he thrust himself forward into the other man’s space, crashing their heads together and causing them both to let out varying degrees of curses (Dan’s far worse than the man’s).

“Sorry, sorry.” Dan gasped out cupping his head with one hand and scraping papers into his briefcase with the other.

“No, I’m sorry,” The other man gasped his voice wavering. It was then Dan realised the man was holding in a laugh.

Dan was the one who finally gave in, feeling a throaty laugh rise and shake his shoulders. The man looked up, a shimmering behind his blue eyes. They were the Caribbean Sea. He too laughed. It was a gasping kind of laugh. Soon the other man’s body was simply shaking, no noise escaping his lips. For a moment, Dan was taken back by the loveliness of the sound before he snapped back to his senses. Since when was he the type to use the word loveliness when describing anyone? It was too early for this shit. He was delirious. 

“I’m honestly sorry about that-” He began but the other boy, notebook in hand came over and tapped him on the shoulder.

“We’ve gotta go, we’ll be late for our lecture,” The man shrugged him off finishing helping Dan gather his papers simply hissing,

“Give us a second, we have plenty of time.” To his friend who’s brow quirked.

“I can buy you another if you want,” The blue-eyed man added pointing to the crushed muffin. Dan instantly shook his head.

“No, it’s fine. Just a little crushed, it’ll still taste fine.” The man’s lips pulled into a tight grin, again he seemed to be fighting a laugh.

“Are you sure? I really don’t mind.”

“It’s fine, really. This muffin and I have bonded. It’s a pretty good representation of my life right now.”

“Messy?” The man, who Dan was internally calling Blue, since he had no name to speak of, asked.

“But tasty,” Dan countered then blushed, realising the double meaning of his words.

“I guess I will take your word for it… I hope it's more tasty than messy at least… That- that came out wrong,” Blue stuttered and faltered a tint of pink blooming in his cheeks.

It was then that the man’s friend grabbed him by the hood of his jumper and dragged him up to a standing position, for the first time adding,

“Sorry about that mate,” Then to the other man,

“But we have to go.”

Blue looked at the other man (yet to be named) and offered him a perplexed look.

“Since when are you is such a rush to get to our lectures?” Blue asked.

The other man looked flustered, almost manic as if there was something itchy lodged under his skin.

“Well, I wanted to pick up a costume on the way. I just have no fucking clue where to get it.”

Dan couldn’t help but listen in to their conversation, wondering curiously what the hell these two were up to and how he had managed to bump into such manic creatures. This sort of thing didn’t happen to him. He wasn’t a magnet for the bizarre. Though he did have a habit of attracting misfortune.

“There is a party costume shop a few blocks down that way,” Dan offered, struggling to gesture with his hands still full. Blue smiled thankfully and took Dan’s coffee from his hand. He simply nodded in quiet thanks.

“See, nothing to worry about,” Blue assured to the other man.

“Will they have a bear costume?” The manic man probed causing both Dan and Blue to shoot him a puzzled glance.

“For what?” They both asked. The boy simply turned to Blue, smacking his notebook with the back of his hand, as if that explained everything. To Blue, at least, it seemed to.

“I’m toying with the name _Unbearable_.”

“This isn’t going to be another _Vegan Zombies,_ is it?”

Dan was utterly lost, wondering if he should push past them, continue his morning coffee and trudge to work like this strange occurrence never happened, but his body wouldn’t let him. This moment felt fluid, tangible. It was as though nothing from this moment on would feel like any of the moments before. This was life in motion.  The last few years of Dan’s life had been a blur of same, this was the strangest and most welcome change.

“Stop talking shit about my children. This _will_ be like Vegan Zombies, but better. All the camp and none of the cringe. Now come on we have a fucking bear costume to buy.”

The two were now huddled close. Dan felt as though he was watching a business meeting or a pregame huddle of the eccentric. Dan was about to leave but Blue was still cradling his coffee close to his chest.

“All we need is someone to wear it,” The manic man paused to consider.

“Just please don’t try and hook me up with whoever it is,” Blue grumbled.

“What if it’s someone you want to hook up with?” Their voices had turned into quick and quiet whispers.

“Like who?”

The unnamed man broke the huddle for a moment to look up, grinning widely at Dan.

“What would you say if I offered you the acting opportunity of a lifetime?”

“Ignore him,” Blue hissed, handing Dan back his coffee a small smile on his lips as he looked to the wrecked muffin once more.

“We better get going.”

Blue grabbed the door, practically shoving his friend through it his eyes shooting daggers at the back of his head.

“Bye, bye Bear,” Blue’s friend yelled over his shoulder. Dan was too stunned to even respond.

“I’m sorry again, about him. Enjoy your tasty mess.”

Blue offered a commiserative wave and like a sun shower, going as quickly as it came, the men headed out of Dan’s life, rushing out into the streets of London. In that moment, he could have never guessed these rushing figures would turn into permanent fixtures of his existence, or that the rest of his life, from that day onwards, would soon muddy and morph.

Daniel James Howell never saw it coming.              

                                                                        ***                       

After the chaos of the early morning Dan was more than happy to sit down in the same seating he had the day prior. He picked at the corpse of his muffin, enjoying and savouring every last crumb. He had bloody well earned it for the odd shit he had just been put through.

He sipped his coffee, daydreaming of the two strange men and suddenly recalled the previous day. He had been doing the same thing, just with different muses. It triggered something in his mind, a niggling thought at the back of his head which caused him to return to the bookshelf and rummage around for the novel he had picked up. Upon opening it he found several new additions made.

_Congratulations random stranger! You win a haunted car and two thumbs up for a great taste in literature. (Also, imagine Victory Fanfare from Final Fantasy VII playing, it makes things more epic.)_

Dan found himself slightly taken aback that someone had not only taken the time to reply to his stupid scribbling but that they had seen it in the first place. His mouth held a goofy grin at reading over the words, for a moment pushing the strange morning interaction to the back of his mind in place of this were the stranger's words. Dan loved video games, Final Fantasy VII was one of his older guilty pleasures. He remembered spending a Christmas morning when he was six, watching his father playing one of the many renditions of the game on an old Nintendo system. He had even attempted to play, but his illiteracy and horrible game controls proved the game to be more difficult than his younger self had first imagined. It hadn't been until he matured slightly that he could truly appreciate one of the later remakes.

This little note from a random stranger had taken him back to this memory. He and his family had never been close, as he aged they had grown apart considerably but this little note took him back to a better time. He could hear the music playing in the back of his mind.  He quietly wished he had read the novel in question, it had just been a lucky guess really. He wanted to impress whoever had spent the time writing back a message to him. Maybe it was just his overwhelming urge to please others that made him feel this way, but something told him this was somehow different.

This shitty, scribbled blue ink caused a fluttering close to nausea in the pit of his stomach. Pleasant nausea, if such a thing existed. He really fucking needed to get out more. Maybe he should follow Dodie's advice and become less of a hermit because such minimal human interaction shouldn't have him in such a fluster.

Before he could second-guess himself he was pulling out a pen and scribbling a reply.

_Thanks, random stranger. You can keep the haunted car, but I’ve got to say, you have a good taste in video games. It makes me wish I actually read the book since we seem to like the same things._

He instantly felt stupid but decided not to scribble out the message, it almost seemed rude not to write back when whoever it was had taken the time to reply. It felt as though they were bonded now, in some strange way. Dan was a fucking puppy, so it seemed. Anything that showed him an inch of affection he seemed to latch onto.

The two men, for example, Blue in particular, came to mind. He felt oddly bonded to them in the same way.

For a moment, he wondered if anyone else felt the same way about strangers. It happened to him with a small handful of people. Something about them, no matter how plain or bombastic, drew him in.

An example of this was a boy, who had sat across from him on the train at a school field trip. Dan had been thirteen and miserable. He would say like most thirteen-year-olds, but after a conversation with his psychologist a few months ago, he had discovered this was a pretty biased point of view. Nevertheless, he had been thirteen and surrounded by his class. It was filled with people he didn't get on with for various reasons, most of which involved him being painfully awkward. Most boys at his age had struggled to talk with people of the opposite sex. Dan, on the other hand, had the pleasure of struggling equally with both. The boy, who sat across from him must have been in his late teens. He wore eyeliner and looked as though he had clawed himself free from the depths of Myspace. He had blue eyes, not as blue as Blue- but still. Dan had been wearing a Muse shirt. The boy had complimented it. That was all. Yet Dan still remembered him.

Fuck, maybe he did 'have a type'. Maybe his past wasn't as black and white as he had first perceived it to be.

He stopped that freight train of thought in motion, knowing too well that he was about to spiral if he let that thought burrow its way into his head. He had the habit of overthinking to the point of obsessiveness. It was something he was working on, another bit of his five-year plan. Stay hydrated, keep negative thoughts at bay, and keep his mental health to a somewhat stable level. Everything else could wait. He didn't have the time for a sexual crisis when the rest of his life was in a state of perpetual crisis.

Dan took several moments to brush off his thoughts and gather his things. As he had the previous day, Dan placed the bookmark back into it's allocated space, this time resting between pages 61 and 62. It was then he let himself shove the strange morning aside, his head filling with work. Laws and loopholes and in turn, ways to avoid it.


	4. Bear and Blue

**_Year 1 - January_ **

_The bear costume had hung in the same costume shop for the better half of a year. Before that, it had been in a factory. Before that, it couldn’t remember.  After the costume shop, however, it went many places. It found itself unwrapped from its plastic wrap bonds, thrown into a duffle bag and carted from apartment flat to apartment flat._

_The first flat smelled constantly of Chinese food, deodorant and photo_ _gelatin. The second smelled like socks and whiskey. It then visited an apartment where it ended up sprawled out on bathroom tiles. It smelled of vomit, Drano and a light floral cover-up. Then there was the last place. An odd place. But it was getting ahead of itself._

                                                                        ***                                        

In the days between that strange Tuesday morning and the Friday night of Dodie's party things had changed for both Daniel James Howell and Philip Michal Lester. Both boys had gained a strange new presence in their lives, delivered to them through pieces of paper, wedged between pages of books.

They had made a routine of it, scribbling back and forth replies, as often as they could. Routine wasn’t the right word. Routine made it sound as though their conversations were a chore. This wasn’t the case. Most days their conversations, however minimal were the highlight of Dan’s day. Soon they ran out of space on their original placeholder, the faithful game of hangman.

It was then that new sheets of paper began to appear. Torn pages from PJ's notepads sat alongside sticky notes from Dan's workplace, both nuzzled together amongst the words of Stephen King. The constant conversation became an ever-burning light in Dan’s otherwise bleak day.

They wrote stupid little back and forth notes, things that shouldn’t mean as much as they did but there was something to it Dan couldn’t put his finger on. They both loved video games, that was clear early on. Whoever it was, judging by their own choice in nostalgic games was several years older than him. Dan didn’t mind. They also loved horror movies, books and all media of the like. Buffy was a big topic of conversation, so much so Dan had managed to stream almost the entirety of the first season within the few days of their casual conversation. It was Friday morning that truly surprised Dan.

Waiting for him, at his now regular seat was a battered copy of the aforementioned _Christine_ with the same scrappy scroll and blue ink Dan had come to know within the few days of their back and forth. His heart was that of a hummingbird’s wings, beating fast and backwards. He was a fucking stray dog, latching onto any attention given to him. He was fucking hopeless. He was an adult. He shouldn’t feel like this from so little. He was a fucking idiot.

_To a random stranger (you know, if you want it)._

He was holding _Christine_. The pages were torn, creased and slightly yellowed. It was a well-loved copy and though it was likely his ‘pen pal’ (for lack of a better term) had just bought a cheap copy for him from a charity shop, Dan liked to think that the one he was holding was theirs.

He then had the instantaneous urge to search it for any clues it might hold to its owner. It smelled of old paper and slightly of something like sandalwood and coconut. It was then Dan realised that him sitting there smelling their book might be bordering on psychotic, stalker-like tendencies so he dislodged his nose from the book. He then did a quick survey of the area in the hopes no one caught his shame and instantly locked eyes with an elderly woman looking at him in such a disgusted manner someone would think he had just removed his clothes and decided to do the fucking conga.

It definitely wasn’t the lowest thing he had been caught doing, so he pressed it to the back of his mind, where all moments like this lay and fester until they would inevitably bubble to the surface at some random and inconvenient time. Like the time when he had accidentally locked eyes with Dodie at a party while she was midway through making out with a girl on exchange from some East- Asian country. Dan remember too clearly the way she had pulled back from the kiss with such awkward shock a trail of spit followed from her lips to the other girl’s.

He had almost forgotten that moment, and now here he was reliving it again. Before he could let his thoughts inevitably spiral into even more treacherous repress memories, like how no one had shown up for his sixth birthday party or how once he had accidentally see Louise in the nude, he chose to open the book. He let the first sentence, scrawled on yellowed paper flow over him like rain on skin.

***

It was in the twilight hours of Friday afternoon when Dan finally surfaced from the depths of _Christine_. He wasn’t particularly a reader. He had over the years flipped through several novels that he would enjoy but law school and their heaped loads of textbooks had spoilt the joy of reading for him indefinitely. After coming home from a long day of bullshit work he would quickly reach for a video game controller as his preferred form of escapism, but today had been different.

He had come home, curled up on the sofa with a book and an old Radiohead album, feeling particularly pretentious for doing so. He felt hours drip away as he flew through the story, his mind always half on the plot and half on the mysterious stranger. He tried to conjure up a face, trying to make it match with the notes he had been receiving but the image was fuzzy. Dan did have a very vague idea of the person, always thinking of their eyes, always blue. Blue like their scribbled pen ink and then of course, with the idea of blue eyes, or even the mention of a simple colour his mind went to the two boys he had seen days before. His mind went to Blue.

Maybe he did have some kind of idea in mind of what this person looked like. He imagined Blue hunched over, cradling a novel in his pale arms, black hair falling askew. He imagined or projected Blue sharing his habit of constantly fiddling with his fringe, smoothing it down every time a strand would fall astray.

The image in his head was so clear it seemed closer to memory. It was a memory like early childhood. The kind of memory you both swore you remembered and knew you were too young to truly recall. It was a fabricated memory based on the stories others had told. Still, he could see Blue doing this so clearly.

Fuck. Even his odd daydreams about Evan Peters weren’t this fanciful. He needed to get his head out of his arse and his shit together. After all, he did have a party to get to. No matter how much it pained him to go, he knew that there was the slimmest chance that once he got there, he might actually have a good time. He tried not to think of the year before. The party to end all parties. The week to end all weeks. The mental breakdown to end all mental breakdowns.

Dan held onto the idea of a good night, as he dragged himself from the sofa and began to get changed.

***

“I don’t see why I have to go.”

Philip Michael Lester wasn’t a ‘party person’. He was thinking this while he sat cross-legged on the floor of PJ’s flat, cradling a takeaway box of chow mein. PJ was in a constant state of renovating his flat. It was always only half made up. Both boys were eating on the floor, gathered around a coffee table. The rest of the room consisted of a TV, several old Nintendo game systems, a plethora of artwork hung on the walls and an ambiguous pile of stuffed animals and figurines of cartoon and video game characters. The TV was playing a subtitled anime on mute.

This was the way Phil liked things. Small get-togethers he could deal with but the idea of a crowded room in some stranger’s flat was enough to give him hives. In fact, any gathering above five made him antsy. He had always done horribly at them, often spending most of his time away from everyone, escaping into a backyard or rooftop. He would even brave back alleys behind nightclubs in university just to avoid hearing Mr Brightside for the third time that night.

“Because Sarah invited us and I said yes, for the both of us.”

PJ’s response was slightly out of character. He wasn't the party type of person either, sure he fared better than Phil but that wasn’t saying much. He did like to dance, drunk or sober. He was horrible either way, too tall, noddle limbs flailing and bending at odd angles. He remembered their mutual friend Chris commenting that seeing PJ dance was one thing every human should get to witness before they died. That, and Phil’s odd drunken rambles of how Samwise Gamgee was the true hero of Lord of the Rings. It wasn’t very often Phil drank but somehow through divine intervention or provocation from others a drunken Phil always managed to stumble onto the topic.

“And why would you do that? Don’t say you’re doing it for me. I know you’re not.”

PJ’s shoulders slumped and he began gnawing on his lip in an indecisive manner. His head swayed from one side to the next as if weighing up his options. In the end, one seemed to win over.

“Alright, I have an idea for the film and I need a cameraman in the right place.”

To this Phil furrowed his brow. It was often PJ had strange ideas for his films but he always shared them with Phil. His latest passion project, however, he was keeping under wraps. Which meant one of two things. He was either doing something so ridiculous he didn’t think Phil would vouch for him, or something borderline sketchy.

“Whatever you’re doing isn’t illegal, is it?” Phil hated that it was the first question that came to his mind.  

“I…” There was a very long pause, too long for it to be a simple no.

“I don’t think so.”

Phil buried several of his fingers into the depths of his jean’s pocket, leaving the others hooked on the outside in a slightly odd, claw-like manner. It was comfortable that way. A strange habit he was almost convinced transpired due to his grandparents being cousins. But that was an odd story for another day.

“I don’t have any money to get you out of jail,” Phil resigned.

“You could always sell your body on the street,” PJ countered.

Phil answered with a scoff and a shake of his head.

“I don’t think I would make that much.”

“Don’t be so down on yourself, I’m sure you could get a few quid on the side. There is an underrated mass market out there for pale scrawny guys.”

Phil screwed up his nose and roughly nudged PJ’s shoulder causing the boy to dump a large portion of his fried rice onto the coffee table. PJ shot him a wicked grin. For a moment the boys turned their attention back to the TV. Watching as large titans kicked their way through city walls. Phil took a hefty mouthful of noodles before speaking.

“Did you know there’s this thing called microphilia…” PJ already held up a hand.

“Surprisingly this isn’t the first time you’ve told me this.”

It was then they lapsed back to normal conversation. Phil hated to admit it but he knew without even having to say it that he would, in fact against his wishes, probably be going to the party.

***

Daniel James Howell was busy wondering what the science was behind drunk girls’ excitement levels pre and post-playing _I Wanna Dance With Somebody_ when Dodie managed to pull him into a half-hearted dance circle. He was tall, awkward and had two left feet. His worst nightmares were already blooming into fruition.

He was busy looking for an exit when his eyes locked with Louise, hunched over the snack table, laughing pointedly at him. Dan wasn’t one to go down alone and so he drew Dodie’s attention to Louise. From there she did all the work, dragging Dan across her living room, her body swaying and gyrating while Dan was her ragdoll, dragging and unenthused.  

Dodie’s insistent hands clasped around Louise’s wrist and they were all dragged into the fray of drunken half-strangers. While Dodie was the life of the party and in her element seemed to float and blend in with the colours of her assorted collection of plug-in disco balls, Dan and Louise were left rigid and twitching.

“Don’t you want to dance? Say you want to dance!” Dodie bellowed out in a half sing-song like screech before stumbling back onto Dan’s shoulder in a slumped heap.

Her face suddenly drained of colour, doe eyes swelling wide. With a deep breath and a quiet thank you, to the god he didn’t believe in Dan locked her slim arm over his shoulder and pulled her into a standing position. He was used to this, he and Louise had already flipped a coin to see who would take care of Dodie when she inevitably needed it. Tonight, it was all on him. Louise smiled and patted Dan on the back before giving him a mock salute.

“Good luck, we should talk later, after you’re done,” She half bellowed over the music that was bouncing about the small room with a rhythmic hum.

The music had invaded Dan’s ears, his bones, his blood. He was convinced that his heartbeat would beat to the tune of Whitney Houston from now on. Dodie really didn’t need another noise complaint, it was just lucky she had invited most of their neighbours over. She had an odd way with people that Dan could never understand. She had even managed to get the seventy-two-year-old woman from a few doors down to come to the party simply by promising to have lots of free food and only play music from before the 2000s. Dan would never understand all the marvels of Dorothy Clark.

Dan had the time to contemplate them all as he dragged her from the living room, down her hallway through a melding, mass of bodies and faces. The distorted image of the closely packed, writhing clump reminding him of the anthropomorphic blob at the end of the game _Inside._ Maybe he did need to get out a little more because his brain was a clustered soup of pop-culture, songs, video games, and the odd legal case.

Finally, they reached the door to her bathroom and after several loud and wary knocks, Dan declared the area safe to enter, dragging Dodie and himself into the bathroom, and kicking the door shut. With a small barrier between them muffling the music Dan could breathe again.

“I’m having so much fun,” Dodie beamed up at him before her eyes glazed over, her face turning from waxen white to sea green.  

It wasn’t the first time the two had been in this situation and Dan’s body moved on impulse, holding Dodie’s hair and guiding her to the toilet, lifting the seat just in time for her to empty the contents of her stomach.

“Same,” Dan groaned, his voice dripping with sarcastic wit as he rubbed small circles in the centre of her back.

“I owe you one again, don’t I?” Dodie whispered after a moment of silence.

“You owe me ten. But sadly, that’s what friends are for.”

“It’s not fair I wanted to help you get laid, not make you clean up puke.” She genuinely sounded sorry, or as sorry as someone could whose face was half buried in a toilet bowl. He didn’t have the heart to be snarky back, for once.

“It’s fine, still plenty of time left in the night.”

Dan didn’t mean it, nor did he even really feel like ‘getting laid’ but he was a people pleaser. He would say whatever made someone else happy, even if it made him miserable. That was something he needed to work on. He had to add that to his five-year-plan. Not be such a fucking sappy push over. Easier said than done.

It was then that the night took a turn for the bizarre.

The bathroom door swung open in one swift and slamming motion and in stormed a man, cursing in his native Irish tongue, his body covered neck to toe in fur, in his arms he cradled the head of an animal. It wasn’t the type of thing Dan’s brain could process in an instant. Instead, he was left gaping slack-jawed waiting for his mind to catch up.

It was a man. A man in a bear suit. The kind one might see in the wings of a football match- not that Dan had seen many of those. A fucking man in a fucking bear suit, cradling the head of a bear in his arms. His face was dripping with sweat. He looked like a manic hunter who had stripped the skin of his prey. It was some odd ritualistic tradition Dan couldn’t yet fathom. This definitely beat the time Tyler had shown up in high heels.

“It’s so fucking hot in this mother-fucker,” The man’s high-pitched voice croaked.

He didn’t seem to realise he had an audience as he removed the costume, stripping with the door still ajar, nothing beneath except a baggy pair of white boxers. It was at that moment Dodie chose to raise her head from the toilet bowl and face him, despite the nauseous look she still wore on her face. Her eyes swelled in comical concern before she threw her head back her body shaking with noiseless laughter.

“Why… the fuck,” She gasped.

“Are you wearing that?”

The man then turned to face them. His pale white skin turned rosy red in an instant. He moved to grab a towel from the towel rack, covering himself in a toga-like fashion. He looked as though he was searching his mind for a reasonable explanation, his mouth opening and closing before he shook his head. He couldn’t explain.

“Long story…” He began when a somewhat familiar voice rose above the muffled sounds of the crowd in the next room.

Dan couldn’t make out what the voice said but it sparked something in the Irish man. He tossed the remains of the suit Dan’s way uttering,

“I’ve gotta go.” Before storming out of the room.

Not for the first time that week, Dan was in the wake of a typhoon. A storm, which somehow acted as a lightning rod for all other strange goings-on. He sat there for a moment in a daze, trying to connect the dots while Dodie’s head drunkenly lulled itself back into the toilet bowl. The dry retching that followed was enough to bring Dan back to the present moment his arms awkwardly pushing the lump of fur to the side. Upon closer inspection, the suit was more akin to mascot attire than realism.  He inspected the lump mindlessly as his body slipped into autopilot, rubbing Dodie’s back, uttering words of reassurance. Most of his words were muffled out by Third Eye Blind singing about not wanting to go to London.

He was so used to this that again he worried that this night would meld into all the other parties he had been to in the past years, melting away into the melded mush of half-sobered nights curled beside one of his friends on bathroom floors. People wondered why he hated parties. Everything about them settled wrong.

Entering a party for Dan always felt like being told your tongue never truly sat comfortably in your mouth. Once the idea had sprung, and the realisation set in, everything was mundanely uncomfortable.

That night, however, would stand out from all the others with the emergence of a blue-eyed, half-stranger in the entrance way of the bathroom, standing where the Irish fur-clad man had stood moments before.

It was the boy from the coffee shop. It was Blue.

***

“Bear?”

Philip Michael Lester was embarrassing himself in front of strangers, half strangers. As per usual. He had meant to be slightly more eloquent. In other words, he at least wanted to make sense but his mind was a spinning blur of borderline social anxiety and shock when he realised the face of the stranger wasn’t so strange after all.

What Phil had meant to say, was:

“Has anyone seen a guy dressed in a bear suit? It’s not as weird as it sounds.”

He tried again and said what he should have. He recognised the boy in front of him as the same boy he and PJ had bumped into several days before. He felt a wave of second-hand embarrassment and a deep and hurtful tugging in his gut.

The bear thing could be explained. He wanted to at least get a chance to say this, but the stranger shocked him silent. His heart is humming and he doesn’t know why. He’s thinking for a moment about how underrated brown eyes are. How characters in romance novels always swoon over sea blue, storm grey, forest green eyes. Brown almost gets left out entirely and he’s thinking how unfair that is.

Brown eyes are more a feeling. He doesn’t know how to explain it. They are cold winter days cuddled up under blankets. They are warm coffee on sleepy mornings. They are coming home to your bed after a long holiday.

The boy, the one from the coffee shop, is kneeling over a girl his hand is placed firmly on her back. His body half shielding her from Phil’s view. The room smelled distinctly of vomit, Drano and a light floral cover-up. He suddenly got the feeling he was interrupting.

The boy, the one from the coffee shop, holds up a lump of fur. It takes Phil a while to realise what it is and when he does his mouth shapes into an O. Another taste of second-hand embarrassment.

“Your Irish mate said it was mother fucking hot in his fur suit then legged it,” The girl, now sitting up looking to Phil, clarified.

She looked as though she were trying to pull herself together, to look presentable and not as though she had spent what smelled like half the night vomiting.  A moment of quiet conversation past between the two of them. The girl’s eyes softened at seeing Phil’s face. He wasn’t sure if she had determined he wasn’t somehow threatening or if it was something else entirely.

Phil quietly offered to get her some water. She smiled faintly but declined holding up a finger looking like a dignitary, slim finger, clipped black nails as if saying ‘wait a moment’ before turning around again and dry retching. He never thought someone could look put together while puking. Maybe he was wrong.

“Oh,” Phil uttered his eyes awkwardly jerking towards the door and the hallway both hating the idea of having to go back out there and feeling like he was invading if he stayed.

He wanted to talk to the boy. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. Maybe ask if his muffin was worth it. He found himself quietly smirking.

“Well… I better look somewhere-”

The girl turned around to face him again for a moment, looking at the boy then back to Phil. Her brows furrowed as if trying to place his face then snapped her finger enthusiastically as if placing it.

She opened her mouth to say something, looking to the boy from the cafe then back to Phil. Her eyes grew shaky soft and her lips pulled together into a tight line. She shook her head as if thinking better of whatever she had been planning on saying. Instead, she seemed to rephrase.

“You’re Sarah’s friend, aren’t you?”

Phil was about to say something along the lines of ‘not exactly,’ but the girl gave him no pause.

“Frank? No- Paul… fuck,” She snapped her fingers several more times while the man, the one from the café looked as though he was silently begging her to keep her mouth shut.

“Phil,” Phil supplied awkwardly.

“Phil!” The girl beamed and pushed the boy from her side and to his feet begrudgingly.

“Phil this is Dan. Dan this is Phil. Dan go get Louise. Take Phil with you.”

Apparently to the man from the café, Dan, this all made perfect sense. He was a chameleon changing from cosmic latte to vermillion.

“Well, at least I get to know the name of the muffin man,” Phil whispered catching Dan’s eye the two of them sharing a quiet inside joke.

He wished the statement had been true, but everything was too loud once they exited the bathroom. After finding Dan’s other friend they were back in the fray of party goers. Every time Dan opened his mouth to speak all Phil could hear was the rattled base of a pop song from several decades before. He would squint his eyes, tilt his head, bite his lip. He would try anything trivial to be able to hear the other man better. He could see his own frustration mirrored on Dan’s face.

“Hey!” Dan’s voice rose in a swell above the chaos.

“Do you want to go somewhere with me?”

Phil tried not to read into the words. He tried to keep his face casual, tried to block hope from his mind. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.

He nodded. Yes.


	5. Butterflies and Hurricanes

**_Year 1 - January_ **

_A flock of pigeons were nestled together, sleeping or half sleeping. Their grime grey feathers laced and melded with the off-white and faded brown feathers of their neighbours. This was their feeble attempt at combating the London freeze. Their close proximity radiated heat. They were nesting on a rooftop. Before that, they were being chased about the streets of London by a determined, yet misshapen feline. Before that, they were loitering outside a popular food promenade begging for scraps. After this, they were being startled awake by the oncoming footfalls of two boys._

_They were not getting ahead of themselves. They were right on time. They flew off into the night._

***

Philip Michael Lester discovered that both he and Dan were rooftop dwellers, strays at party scenes and recluses. He felt as though he knew this, and still, the information was welcomed. He loved that it was finally quiet.

The two of them were standing on the roof of the building, both peering over the edge, not at the bustle and chaos that was late night London but instead at the stars. Phil figured Dan had asked him up to talk but neither of them is talking, just staring. It was as though they both had so much to say and no way to articulate it.

Phil didn’t know how to explain this feeling but strangely enough, it had been the second time today he felt such nervous butterflies. The first had been when he decided to give his copy of _Christine_ to the stranger he had been writing to. They shared such similar interests and though they were only writing back and forth, though a day past between each reply, Phil still felt as though conversation was simple with this person. He wished he was as brave in real life as he was through text.

“I wish it was darker,” Dan mumbled beside him causing Phil to look over at the boy.

“So you could see the stars, I mean. Light pollution and all that.”

It was the strangest attempt at small talk Phil had ever heard. It caused a smile to tug at the corner of his lips.

“There are still some stars though… look.”

Phil moved closer. His side digging into Dan’s side as he pointed upwards. Maybe he was touching the boy too much. Maybe he was getting too close. He could see Dan exhale, his breath wafting up into the sky a cloud of heat against the chilly London air.

“That’s Vega… I think and I’m sure maybe if you squint really hard you might be able to see a planet. Mars… Venus? I don’t know.”

Dan’s eyes followed the through line drawn from them to the sky. He then chuckled and squinted harder.

“How hard to I have to squint to see it?” He asked as he shoved his fingers into the depths of his pockets. Phil noticed them trembling slightly but thought it best not to mention it.

“You know when you squint so hard that you start seeing little dots of light? That hard. Then maybe shut both eyes.”

That got a true laugh out of Dan, smoke pooling from his lips like smoke from a dragon, flying up to the stars. Phil’s breath snagged and did the same, pulling upwards to the sky. Their breaths mingled and disappeared.

“Fucking smart arse.” There was no venom in Dan’s words. They were light as air, lighter still. They were helium.

“Great… but I thought I was bringing you up here to work out why the fuck I had to watch a man in a fur suit strip in front of me.”

“Not your ‘thing’ then?” Phil was never this forward. God knows what had possessed him but he could feel the nervous energy from before melt away. This stranger, half-stranger, not stranger at all, made him comfortable.

“I mean- maybe if I had time to consent it would be a different story,” Dan scoffed out.

He had dimples, Phil came to realise and all at once he wanted to reach out and touch them. He held back, obviously but something in his eyes must have given away some of his thought.

“Quit staring at my deficiency.”

“Your what?” Dan’s rolling his eyes.

“Dimples, they are really just deficiencies.”

“They are cool deficiencies,” Phil countered.

This earned him a bigger smile. The world didn’t just turn upside down, it inverted. Phil’s butterflies were hurricanes. He then realised he had a story to tell. He wanted to drag it out for as long as possible, wanted to make this moment last.

“I’m not exactly sure where to start with the bear thing. There is a lot of exposition needed.”

This didn’t seem to deter Dan. He clambered to the edge of the building, sitting down there. His legs dangled mindlessly from such a height. For a moment Phil was thinking of another night, a time before this one. He shoved the night from his mind and sat beside Dan the whole world under his feet zooming millions of miles away. He was perched at the edge of a building in the sky. He went pale.

“Don’t like heights?” Dan asked, instantly sensing Phil’s discomfort.

“I’m fine with kind of high but this is Korin Tower high.”

Dan raised a brow, looking as though he was holding in a laugh. He then shuffled back from the edge, instead sitting on the ground a few feet back. Phil followed suit.

“Nice reference, nerd. Very old.” Phil was beginning to think that teasing was how Dan showed affection. Maybe he was just hoping.

“References can still be good and be old.”

Dan scoffed, shaking his head slightly before his hand momentarily moved to Phil’s knee. Phil tried to keep his breathing even. He liked this guy. His body has been telling him that all night but now his mind has caught up. Crap. He liked this guy.

“Come on, you have a story to tell. Out with it. Or else I’ll keep thinking you and your friends are in some closeted furry cult.”

Phil laughed shaking his head before moving slightly closer to Dan. He could see the boy’s hands were shaking slightly from the cold and felt the overwhelming urge to reach out. He held back, knowing that he was probably reading the situation all wrong.

“Well, that guy who ran into you the other day, he’s my best mate, and sort of my… partner, I guess.” Phil was ready to keep going but Dan made an audible ‘oh’, at the word _partner_ which made Phil furrow his brow in confusion before catching on, his nose screwing up.

“No, not like that. Like a business partner. We make films or at least we try to.”

Phil didn’t know if he imagined Dan’s shoulders perking up slightly after that before slumping down again. This time Phil could practically see the cogs turning in his brain.

“I didn’t mean, ‘oh’ like it was a bad thing… or whatever I just meant… I mean if you were that would be cool. I have nothing against- I mean there’s nothing to be against…” Dan is floundering.

Phil is about to try and pull him out of his tailspin by assuring him he knew what Dan meant, though he wasn’t altogether sure he did. Dan seemed to recover on his own his head rising slightly as he asked,

“Anyway, what type of movies do you make?”

“Horror films, mostly. Though some of them I wouldn’t really classify as horror. Genres are tricky but I suppose- yeah.”

Neither of them is looking at each other now. The tension seemed to grow again, Phil’s shoulders were two wooden planks, keeping his head attached to his body. His body twitched with small shivers in the cold night air.

“Where does the bear suit come in?”

“Well… PJ- my friend, he had this idea to do a short film based on… I don’t know, a rabid bear that gets loose from some underground testing facility. Very _Godzilla_ , but whatever. He wanted to have some live footage of people’s reactions. Like in _Under the Skin_ , where they just filmed Scarlett Johansson pulling up her car and asking real random people for directions. It was an interesting concept. I guess. A little invasive.”

Dan’s eyes trailed over Phil in the strangest of ways. He felt as though he was being listened to. Really listened to. Dan was nodding at all the right times, his eyes curious and alert. He went on to ask more questions. He asked about the other films they made and what the most ridiculous thing he had to do for one of his films was.

“Once PJ wanted this sweeping shot under a motorway and we had little to no equipment so he got it by grabbing onto my shins and dangling me over the edge of an overpass… and then we almost got arrested.”

Dan’s brown eyes swelled wide, his mouth shaping something half way between a gasp and a smile. There was something in his eyes Phil couldn’t place but he seemed so enthralled. Even when Phil went on long tangents, which wouldn’t really go anywhere or start talking about random facts he knew Dan’s interest never wavered. He kept asking questions, kept teasing. Every now and again his hand would trail over and brush against Phil’s leg or hand and send his heart into another frenzy. He really liked this guy.  

“Willing to die for your craft… That’s dedication,” Dan joked.

“More like unwillingly sacrificed for my craft. But same thing.”

For a moment they were both silent, letting the air hang palpable between them. It wasn’t uncomfortable. It was just silent. It was rare you could find someone who you almost instantly felt comfortable with even in silence. It was strange.

“I can’t handle horror movies. I’ve never seen one in cinemas. The ones I have seen have been with a bunch of friends at their flat, in broad daylight and I’m still pretty sure I had to sleep over. I was too worried I would go home and have a small Asian woman craw out of the T.V. and strangle me while I slept.”

“You have to see them in the cinemas though. There is such a… crowd mentality about it. It’s like the old days in movies where people weren’t quiet they laughed and screamed and yelled at the screen. That’s the whole reason movies used to be amazing or at least that’s what my grandfather used to tell me. Now the only place people still do that is horror films or maybe midnight premieres.”

Dan screwed up his nose and shook his head as if shaking away the thought.

“People being loud in movies? No thanks.”                              

To that, Phil rolled his eyes.

“If you’ve never been to one you wouldn’t know, would you? Come on. I am going to make you come watch one with me.”

At this both he and Dan seemed to blink as if realising a proposition had been made. At first, Phil hadn’t meant to do it. He was caught up in the idea of it but as soon as he said it he knew he wanted it to happen. He wanted to see Dan again. He hoped Dan felt the same. This next beat of silence wasn’t a comfortable one.

“Did you just ask me to see a film with you?” Dan questioned his face seeming to hold back a smile.

“I might be. It depends if you’re going to say yes or not.”

Dan’s brain goes into overdrive. Phil watches Dan’s hands, now removed from his pockets, fingers drumming on the inside of his palm. Phil watches Dan’s head toss from one side to the next as if quietly weighing up his options. Phil is suddenly nervous. Despite the cold his hands are clammy. He likes this guy. He is doomed.

“It depends if it’s a pity invite or an actual invite,” Dan finally breathed.

Phil didn’t understand. His phone buzzed in his pocket. Probably PJ wondering where he was. He ignored it, looking back at Dan.

“Why would it be a pity invite?”

Dan looked as though he already had a list as long as his lanky arm planed out within the second it took Phil to ask the question. That worried him.

“It’s not a pity invite.” Phil cleared the air.

“I want you to come. It will be fun. You seem cool. We should hang out. Maybe just not at parties, since we both kind of hate parties.”

“And it has nothing to do with you trying to make up for the fact that your friend decked me the other day?” Dan clarified.

“No.”

No, it’s because Phil loved Dan’s eyes and his smile. It was because when he talked Dan listened. It was because Dan understood without needing to say he understood. It was because Dan took him to a place he hadn’t let himself go since their first-time meeting. It was because Phil knew, somehow in that moment that he liked this guy. It was because he wasn’t the type of person to think he needed other people but still seemed to need this one person. It was because he wasn’t an overdramatic person but Dan was air to a drowning man and that was the most dramatic thought he ever had.

“No, not at all.”

Phil’s phone began to ring. He saw PJ’s number and declined. He would understand.

The phone immediately started to ring again. Phil groaned shooting Dan an apologetic look before answering the phone.

“I can’t find the suit.” PJ opened the conversation with no formal hello.

“I text you. It was in the bathroom.”

“ _Was._ I can’t bloody well find it now. Someone stole it.”  

He looked Dan over before internally groaning. He gestured for Dan’s phone, the boy gave it over with a beat of hesitation. Phil added himself as a contact then handed it back to Dan.

“Why would someone steal it?”

“ _Ex-fucking-actly._ Why would someone steal it? It was probably Bertie from film school. That fucking bastard. I need backup.”

Phil’s eyes were locked on Dan. The boy was looking down at his own phone, playing a game, looking as though he was listening but trying to seem like he wasn't.

“Do we have to do this tonight?”

“Yes. It cost a week’s rent.”

Phil shot Dan an apologetic look.

“I have to go,” He clarified.

“But text me, okay? I’m not letting you get away that easily.”

Dan nodded at this, his attention now turned back to Phil. He gestured for the other man to follow him back to the party but Dan simply shook his head.

“I might stay here for a while.”

Phil didn’t have the time to argue so instead he smiled at the man offering a slightly awkward, one armed hug. He was unsure why he had done it. He wasn’t the type to be physically affectionate but this was another thing that didn’t seem to apply with Dan. He seemed to be an exception to all rules.

Dan hugged back. For a moment, Phil wasn’t sure if he would. Phil wouldn’t blame him and yet he did. He smelled of something entirely unique to him. Phil wouldn’t learn how to define this smell until much later. But he was getting ahead of himself. The night was young and apparently, he had a bear thief to catch.

***

Daniel James Howell was about to go to sleep that night but found the room was too blue to allow it. He couldn’t keep his mind off the confusion that was Phil Lester. He couldn’t get over the pathetic little voice in his head that kept niggling at him to text. Phil gave him his phone number but he didn’t give Phil his. That meant it was all up to Dan to decide whether this continued or not.

The mere thought of the idea gave him anxiety. He tried to distract himself by reading more of _Christine_ but this only brought up new worries. He read, trying to stop himself from thinking and overthinking. It was then he stumbled upon a line which made him put the book down,

_‘Love is old slaughterer. Love is not blind. Love is a cannibal with extremely acute vision. Love is insectile, it is always hungry’_

He wasn’t in love. He knew that. It was just late and he was overthinking.

Dan was thinking about texting and not texting. He was thinking about Blue, who was Phil and Phil who was Blue. He was thinking about his strange pen pal and how he wasn’t Blue and in turn wasn’t Phil. He was thinking about how both almost strangers made him feel the same. He was trying to work out how this could be and if he could keep talking to both. He kept feeling like he had to pick one or the other.  He didn’t know why.

For a moment, he was thinking about being gay and being straight. He was thinking about being neither. He was thinking about being friends and being something more, wondering where the line was. His sexual crisis was in full swing.

He didn’t even know if this guy liked him back- not like that at least. He was setting himself up for heartache.

Still, he rolled over at four in the morning no less and texted, his brain still foggy:

**What movie did you have in mind? This is rooftop / coffee shop guy (Dan).**

When he awoke in the morning in his right sense of mind he would question his own use of brackets and blame it on sleep deprivation. He didn’t have enough time to question it fully because with a shiver down his spine he realised Phil had text back.

_Hi (Dan). This is other rooftop/coffee shop guy (Phil). There is one showing next Saturday at 10. You up for it?_

Dan wondered if he should play it cool. If he should wait a few hours to reply. He then wondered why he was following a protocol normally outline for dating, again he wondered if this was a date then demanded himself to stop overthinking it and inevitably text Phil back less than a minute later.

**Do I have a choice? (Yes).**


	6. The Definition of Insanity

**_Year 1 - September_ **

_The London Underground in its morning peak time sees around fifty-seven thousand people entering at the Waterloo station alone. It does not remember every face that has ever travelled with it.  It is impossible to remember such a thing, even for a non-corporeal train. It could on the odd occasion remember familiar faces, those who rode it often._

_Dan and Phil had both become common commuters. The train knew them well. It knew all the comings and goings. Late night travels from one apartment to the next. There was little space between the two. This night, however, was the story coming full circle. It was not the story of The Underground or even the story of Dan and Phil. It was the story of the bear suit and where it went after it ended up sprawled out on bathroom tiles in the room that smelled of vomit, Drano and a light floral cover-up._

***

Dan’s phone shutters to life, wrapping like a knock against the hardwood of his desk. He was working overtime. It was the fourth day that week he had stayed late. His eyes bore black-blue circles. He was used to casual insomnia, due to late night coffees, video games and whatever project Phil and PJ had decided to involve him in. He wasn’t used to being up so late due to work.

His client was innocent. He knew that much. He had a gut feeling. That's why he had taken on the extra case pro bono. He was defending an eighteen-year-old who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and also the wrong nationality when it came to being on the right side of law enforcement. It was fucking ridiculous that skin colour should have anything to do with legal merit but it was just a fact. Being a poor, non-white, teenager caught at the wrong time of the night on the wrong side of town at a crime scene with no other suspects was enough to get him far too much time in prison. Innocence and insufficient evidence wasn’t always enough.

It was fucking unfair. Dan knew this so he swallowed his complaints and worked long into the night. His phone shuttering to life was enough to turn his body rigid. He had been in the zone, so to speak. It was something that rarely ever happened when he was with his normal clients. They consisted almost exclusively of multimillion-dollar companies and rich white kids of billionaires with too much time on their hands. Both of which were rarely ever convicted. He barely had to be good at his job to keep them from being convicted. Law school in itself had been a joke. All he had learnt was how to say a crime was premeditated in Latin ( _mens rea_ ) and how to suck a jury’s dick into submission.

His phone continued its slightly annoying buzz. Dodie’s number flashed on the screen. He answered.

“Hello?” There was a long pause.                    

“Dan- are you home?” Dan could hardly hear her over the throb of muffled music.

“No, I’m still at work.” Another long pause. He could hear a sharp intake of breath. Her voice bounced and echoed. It sounded like she was in a public bathroom, at a club, likely.

“Alright, never mind.”

It didn’t seem like something he should just brush off so he stayed on the phone closing the window he had open on his computer screen. He pulled his full attention to Dodie. 

“Talk to me, what’s going on?”

“It’s stupid really. I went out and a guy was being kind of creepy. I didn’t want to ride The Tube alone. That’s all, it’s probably stupid. It’s only a few stops to get home and your work is on the other side of town. Don’t worry about it alright?”

For a moment Dan rubbed his temples, suddenly as though they had begun to throb. He can’t let her go home by herself but he also knows it would take at least an hour to get there. Which in turn meant she would have to spend another hour dodging the ‘creepy’ dude. He asked where she was and scribbled the address on a sticky note as his mind stringed together a plan.

“Hold tight okay? I’ll get someone there in about fifteen. If he tries anything before then kick him in the dick and run.” At that, he heard her laugh.

“I have taken a self-defence class. But thanks for the advice. I’ll keep it in mind.”

There was more she wanted to say. He knew this but also knew now wasn’t the opportune time to tell it. He understood her silence and knew he should head home as soon as possible so they could talk through whatever she really wanted to talk about. For now, however, he was counting his blessings and hoping that Phil was as good a person as he seemed to be.

***

Phil was being swallowed by the black mirror that was his computer monitor. Behind his bespectacled face, his eyes were unblinking and redraw. He had spent the better part of an hour adjusting the colour temperature of their latest film, stitching together the ideal cut scenes and scribbling down time stamps and auditory cues for Dan to inspect whenever he got the chance.

Tonight, he and PJ were editing at his flat. PJ was currently cradling his laptop sitting cross-legged on the carpet editing the first fifteen minutes of their short film while Phil edited the last. He was curled into himself at his computer desk, hunching over. The screen began blurring before his sleepy eyes. It had been a long few nights but they had a deadline to meet.   

To his surprise, his phone began to ring. No one called him. It was the twenty-first century. Everyone was either texting or using some form of online messaging app. Another surprise, it was Dan’s number. With an air of confusion and worry boring bone-deep, Phil answered the call.

“Hello?” Even Phil’s voice sounded uncertain. PJ raised his head, momentarily curious.

“Hey. I know this is a little out of the blue, but you know how you’re my favourite person in the world…?”

Dan wanted something. Phil could read it in his voice and still, he couldn’t stop a wide grin from spilling over his face.

“I could be told a few more times, so I can know for sure… but, whatever it is you want me to do, I’ll do it.”

It sounded more desperate out loud than it had in his head as a single look from PJ confirmed. There was no going back now though and he could hear Dan breathe out an audible sigh of relief.

“You don’t even know what it is yet.” Phil could hear the smile in Dan’s voice.

“No, but you tend to be able to persuade me into anything- so what is it?”

“If I give you an address can you meet Dodie there and take her back to her flat? I should be able to get free and meet you outside her flat. I’m at work at the minute and I’m ages away. Some dude’s being an arse and she doesn’t want to go home alone.”

Phil is already saving (and double saving) his file of the film and shutting down the computer. He realises his hair’s a mess and he can’t be bothered to put in his contact lenses, also he hasn’t shaved. He was just seeing Dan, it shouldn’t bother him that he was rough around the edges but it did.

“No worries, I was feeling like getting out for a bit anyway.” It was a total lie.

PJ was already looking at him, throwing up his hands in silent frustration his body asking, ‘ _what are you doing?’_ Without needing to say it.

“Oh, okay well- thank you anyway. Seriously. I owe you one.”

Phil wasn’t the type to keep score and it was a good thing because even off the top of his head he knew Dan owed him far more than one. Phil didn’t care about keeping even. Keeping Dan happy was keeping things even.

“No worries, see you in a bit.”                         

Phil hung up the phone and looked at PJ realising he had shut down his laptop and was about to stand.

“Where are we off to?” He asked and to Phil’s surprise, he could hear the slight tinge of snide in his voice as though he knew full well he wasn’t invited.

“Well…” PJ held up a hand.

“I don’t need you to tell me I’m not invited. Dan called and you’re at his beck and call. Go hang out with your new best friend- whatever.”

At this Phil paused, stopping trying to iron down his hair with his hands and find a jacket. He wasn’t sure he needed one at this time of year but it was better safe than sorry.

“What are you talking about? You’re my best friend,” He countered plainly, because he was.

“It doesn’t feel like it.”

Phil looked at the time then to PJ knowing they needed to talk but also realising he didn’t have the time.

“Just go, whatever. Just finish your bit of the film by Monday.”

“You’re my best friend Peej. Promise.” Phil wasn’t just going to let it go.

“Then why are you spending all your time with him?”

Something about the way Phil looked must have given it away. He didn’t know what he said or what gave it away but suddenly a new expression washed over PJ’s face. It was a look of understanding. A bucket of ice water over his head. His look was simply knowing.

“Are you two…” Phil went back to looking for his jacket.

“No. We aren’t… I mean- we… it’s complicated.”

“Draw me a diagram then you either are or you aren’t.” Phil really didn’t have time for this.

“If you squint really hard then maybe there’s something there but I think I messed it up- alright? I’ve gotta go.”

Phil was in a fluster at this, rummaging through his coatrack for his jacket, then moving to search under the ever-growing pile of scripts and storyboards on his coffee table. He needed his jacket. PJ, for once looked like he really did care. A lot of the time Phil felt as though their friendship was a mess of convenience mixed with good timing. He felt like PJ loved what they could do together but often got bored of just being together. Sometimes he felt more like a business partner than a best friend. Now, however, PJ was looking at him as if he had suddenly realised how emotionally absent he had been lately.

“It’s his loss, you know.” That was when Phil remembered why PJ was his best friend.

“No. It’s not his fault. It’s mine- I think. I’ll talk to you about it later. I do really need to go.”

PJ was the one who found Phil’s jacket, wedged between his sofa cushions. Phil mumbled out a ‘thank you’ and with one look both boys seemed to promise they would have a real heart to heart whenever they next saw each other. Phil wasn't looking forward to having to dissect all the interweaving threads that were his and Dan’s relationship. Still, he would try. For now, however, he really was at Dan’s beck and call.

***

“I like the glasses, very academic.” Dodie Clark praised while inspecting Phil’s glasses, placing them on her own face.

She blinked several times as the fluorescent yellow glow of the train lights bounced off the clear rims. The train shuttered to life. They hadn’t been followed but Phil still felt watched. He kept looking over his shoulder. He didn’t like the feeling. Maybe this was what he got from too many horror films. He loved to create brave and strong protagonists but he could never be them. He couldn’t last a moment in his own films.

“Thank you, by the way. You didn’t have to come it was nice of you,” Dodie continued.

At this, she handed Phil back his glasses and the world zoomed back into focus. He could count every freckle on her face, every curl of her hair. Her mascara had smudged slightly, leaving several blotches of black beneath and above her eyelids.

“No worries. It wasn’t any trouble.”                

On this late-night London trip, they were almost alone on the train. There was a handful of other people spread across various carriages but for once the place felt empty. Late-night London was usually a mash of moving masses, particularly when it came to The Tube but tonight, for whatever reason it was almost desolate.

The train swayed violently as they plummeted through the blackness. The girl in the corner sneezed. A man two seats down had the music in his headphones so loud Phil could hear JME’s slurred grime tunes from where he was sitting. He wouldn’t want to be alone here either, not tonight. Something about this night felt… strange.

Dan was always talking about how music could make things tenser. He would talk about how most of the true scares of a film was brought on by the score. But in this moment Phil came to realise that a lack of any true noise could also be disconcerting. There was the drone of the train and then every shifting from everyone on it. It was truly strange, as if he had fallen into the twilight zone.

“You’re a nice guy- you know that?” Dodie asked out of the blue. They were the only two talking.

“I’m really not that nice.”

She shot him a ‘cut the crap’ kind of look. Then pulled out her phone and began reapplying her lipstick, a deep and bruised purple. She inspected her reflection, picking at the specks of mascara before giving up. She yawned and slid down in her seat, resting her head on Phil’s shoulder.

Phil suddenly realised why this night was so uncomfortable. He knew why this night felt so strange.

“I know it was you, I remember seeing you, hearing your voice. I wasn’t sure for a long while but I know. When I first saw you in the bathroom at that party, I thought it might be you. That’s why I nicked that stupid bear suit you had been looking for… Sorry.” Dodie shot him an apologetic smile.

“I really need to give that back. It’s at Louise’s house. I’m not even sure you’d want it. She used it as a cot blanket for a bit. Probably sticky with puke and… worse. I just- I didn’t want you to leave with no way of contacting you. Stupid I know. I just thought if I had it then you would have to come back,” She sucked in a deep breath when at first Phil didn’t say anything.

“I thought it was you and if you and Dan weren’t going to talk about it, I at least wanted to talk to you about it. You haven’t… talked about it, have you?”

“I don’t think he wants to talk about it,” Phil’s voice was barely a whisper. It was hardly audible above the rumble of the train. Dodie shot him a sad look.

“God knows what goes on in his head half the time. Anyway, thank you for looking after him,” She continued before shutting her eyes letting the conversation drop there. Phil was glad. He didn’t know if he was up for the conversation.

“I always will,” Phil whispered after far too long.                 

Dodie looked up sleepily, her brows drawing together. They were pulling up at a station. The glow from the various light up advertisements at the station turned her face from yellow to blue. No one got off. Three men got on.

“I always will look after him.”

“Good,” She breathed letting both eyes glide shut as the train slipped out of the station.

“He’s bloody hopeless. The more people looking after him the better.” 

                                                                        ***                              

They met in the hallway. Despite Dan having a head start, in true Daniel Howell fashion he still managed to be the last one there. Dodie and Phil were talking. Dan suddenly had the overwhelming urge to know what they were talking about. He didn’t know where this intrusiveness came from, though he had a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with the voice in the back of his head saying that for whatever reason, they were talking about him.

At a distance he noticed they were smiling, Dodie even laughed at something he said. A whole new form of dread bloomed in the pit of his stomach. He stalled, pausing where he stood, stuck in quiet deliberation. Phil raised his head, smiled brilliantly and waved him over. Dan’s frozen legs melted into submission and he began to walk. Phil’s smile was a subtle siren song.

“Hey,”                                                  

“Sorry I’m late,” Dan countered, knowing they had this conversation several dozen times in the few months they had known each other. Phil just shrugged as though he had already expected it.

“Better late than never… rat.”

Dan wasn’t sure when Phil had picked up on the fact that his own hostile teasing had been a form of affection and in turn seemed to have picked it up himself. Most people around them would look oddly surprised when they caught fractions of their conversation, they were the strange in-between of loving affection and teasing vitriol. That being said, if anyone else was even jokingly cruel to Phil, Dan would instantly feel a bubble of rage fester in the pit of his stomach.

“Just putting off having to see your face… snake.”

“Snakes eat rats, you know that right?” Phil asked with a sly tilt of his head.

“Try me.”

By their side, Dodie spluttered and looked away, acting as if she were suddenly interrupting. It was a strange sight, two six-foot-tall giants dwelling in the hallway between them a small girl clearly tired and worn thin. Half her makeup had been sweated off and her clothes hung in a haphazard way, her shoes in hand.

“I think that may be my cue, actually.” She breathed a second later stepping back towards her door.

“Thank you for everything,” She directed to Phil.

“I thought we were meant to hang out,” Dan stuttered in confusion but she simply faked a yawn.

“I’m too tired tonight, we are having breakfast together tomorrow though, no excuses.” She directed to Dan before moving to unlock her door.

“Don’t have too much fun without me,” She giggled disappearing into her apartment, leaving the two boys standing alone in the hall.

There was a beat of silence. Dan watched Phil awkwardly shifting from one foot to the next as if unsure what to do next. Dan wanted to invite him inside but thought he knew better.

“I like your glasses,” Dan wasn’t sure he had even said it loud enough for Phil to hear but he began to smile. Dan instantly freaked.

“Did you know, you can’t fold a piece of paper more than seven times?” Dan blurts out. He’s used to Phil always supplying random facts so he is filling the void with them.

“I did, actually,” Phil is playing with the hem of his jacket.

“Did you know the average person has 10 000 taste buds?” Phil countered.

“No, I didn’t.”

Dan felt himself shift onto the wall beside Phil opposed to opposite him. He wanted to be closer. He too began fiddling with the stray string of Phil’s jacket, every now and again their fingers passing over one another’s.  Dan could feel the tension in the air but instantly knew he was reading it wrong. They had been here before, he told himself. He knew how it would end.

“Did you know that Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?” Dan didn’t know why he said this. He felt Phil stiffen slightly.

“I did.” He said after a beat too long. Dan ruined it.

“Did you know, Nicolas Winding Refn is colour blind?” Phil blurted out a second later.

“Was that a hint?” Dan scoffed out.

 “I was just thinking of how much I wanted to watch _Drive_ with you.” Phil continued and Dan didn’t know how to take this. Saying he was getting mixed signals was an understatement.

“Are you saying you want to watch _Drive_ for the third time?”

Phil stopped playing with his jacket, pausing to look at Dan.

“Well, I mean we’ve already watched both parts of Kill Bill five times.” Dan was confused but could feel a smile working at the corner of his lip.

“And we have watched every internet cat video in existence- or at least it feels like it.”

“And every video that involves dogs… ever.”

“So, I suppose watching Drive for the third time might not be so bad,” Dan chuckled already opening his door.

He had told himself he wasn’t going to let this happen again and yet here he was. It was happening again. He was about to break his own heart because apparently, he had never realised how much of a fucking masochist he really was. Phil didn’t like him. He was just a touchy person, that’s who he was. Dan needed to get the idea of the two of them being together in any tangible form out of his head. Fuck- he would have a better chance getting laid by his possibly non-existent pen pal. 

“Fourth time… watching _Drive_ ,” Phil corrected as the two made their way into Dan’s flat. Phil began helping him set up snacks and drinks.

Dan couldn't believe he was doing this again. He was too distracted to pay attention to what Phil had said.

“Oh, right. Fourth time.”


	7. Event Horizon

**_Year 1 – February_ **

_The Prince Charles Cinema had been standing at its home in Leicester Place since its creation on the 18 th of December 1961. People had been falling in love with films, within its walls since its opening on the 24th of December 1962. _

_The director, Quentin Tarantino had once stated that the day his film, Kill Bill played at the cinema was the day the film came home. If a building could paint itself red with blush, it would have.  As far as cinemas go, it prided itself with being one of the best. That night, as with most nights, it was open late. For the Prince Charles Cinema, it was an unremarkable evening but for its inhabitancies, it was anything but._

_***_

Dan stood, looking at his reflection in the full-length mirror, assessing the third outfit he had tried on for the night. Like lint on clothes, he was busy picking apart this outfit and more importantly the person in it. Dan had never been overly kind to himself, but he was working on that.

 Dan had time to overthink his clothes: black jeans and an oversized sweater, colours mirroring the poster for the film he and Phil were planning on seeing. It was a stupid idea to match. He had just thought maybe it would make Phil smile. Maybe he would look in place beside the posters. With his six-foot frame and social ineptitude, Dan was always trying to blend in. Maybe it was another odd coping mechanism he had gained over the years. He was about to change for the fourth time when he realised if he stalled any longer, he would be late.

It was then he shook his doubts or at least let himself succumb to the fact that no matter what he wore, with enough time he would find a way to pick it apart. Squaring his shoulders, he tried to quiet his internal dialogue. Shutting off the constant questioning.

_Is this a date? Have I gotten everything wrong? What if he doesn't show up? Fuck. What if I say something stupid… what if-_

Dan couldn’t find his shoes. He hadn’t been thinking about shoes. He was going to be late. He needed shoes. He was too damn stuck in his own head. He needed to find his shoes. He needed to leave. He needed to be on time.

***

Dan walked the late-night London streets, surprised by the activity at such an hour. Even now after living in London for a large portion of his adult life the buzzing of the city surprised him. His hometown felt sedated in comparison. 

It was on late nights like this he realised just how much space was between him and the place he grew up. Not just physical space. Logically he knew it wasn’t as large as it seemed. Most other countries spanned a far greater space than England. He knew this. He knew that a day trip at most to get back home compared to the vastness of the world was nothing. The closeness of London and his hometown, in retrospect, was suffocating, but his mind was a million miles away from that place.

His mind was locked on the idea of space. How things could be both so close and so far. He had no idea that this night could be a game changer. One that would forever be both so close and so far. This night was a changing in the tides of his life. Dan just didn’t know it yet.

His eyes moved from London, down to his phone, at the time. He was going to be late. He looked to his shoes, the glowing eyesore of them, cringed and began running. He needed to be on time.

***

Phil clambered from his train to the exit of Leicester Square Station, eyes fixated on his feet, fingers constantly flicking through his hair, a form of nervous tick. Even at this hour, London was alive. It was strange really. Riding the Tube during the early morning or mid-afternoon commute always made Phil feel strange. He was a technicoloured character in a black and white world. It was a sea of sullen faces and black suits, skirts, white shirts and blouses. It always seemed as though the world was on the brink of invasion. The rise of the undead stockbrokers.

Today he’d sat there, hunched over his phone. His jacket was the purple and pink mix of a puffy, galaxy daydream. His socks mismatched, one green, one blue. If this were a time of commuting he would stick out like a sore thumb, but this was London at night. London at night was a different beast.

There were tattooed teens, loud and laughing foreigners, cosplay characters and across from him a man with more piercings than skin. Phil wasn’t the type of person who liked parties but he loved people. Loved them from afar. More as strange and moving stories and characters. People were like paintings. From afar, they were art. Up close you could see the brush strokes, the layers of paint. Up close the illusion was ruined. People were better from afar. He loved all the odd shapes of them. They were equal parts fascinating and terrifying.

Sometimes Phil wished he were more outgoing. Still, he attracted all the odd people of the world, it was like they could smell something on him. He had talked to the pierced man, mostly about where he was going (The Hippodrome Casino) and who he was meeting (a friend who could apparently count cards). All the while Phil’s hands twitched. Still, in late night London Phil’s own flavour of strange seemed tame and this made him feel at home.

He had mumbled an awkward goodbye to the man as they went their separate ways. Phil was left with his own thoughts.

He was early. He was always early. He didn’t want to leave Dan waiting. He wondered if he was too forward with asking Dan to come with him. They hardly knew one another. He wasn’t even sure what _he_ was meant to make of the night, let alone Dan. He had dug himself in deep with this one. At the same time, however, as he took the short walk from Leicester Square Station to The Prince Charles cinema he couldn't help but feel a flutter in his stomach. He was somewhere between throwing up and passing out. He had never felt more alive.

It was strange. In the week they had been apart, Phil had been taking mental notes of small things he wanted to tell Dan. He would see a video game, or a funny internet video, maybe read about a random fact and his first thought was how much he wanted to tell Dan about it. Sure, there was texting- but that was different. He wanted to see Dan. See his dimples when he smiles, hear his laugh. He was in over his head.

Then there was the unspoken third party. The person he had been writing to. The person who also loved all the games Phil did, also loved it when he rambled about things he loved (mostly Buffy and movies) even if it was through his scribbled handwriting. He wanted to tell them everything as well. His heart was a house divided.

He had never lacked love, no matter how many people tried to convince him otherwise. He had not been in a romantic relationship for longer than most would consider ‘normal’, but that didn’t mean he was ever lacking in love. He had PJ and a handful of other friends from university and previous jobs that he would follow to the end of the earth, and in turn, they would do the same. His family was small, but always present. His mother called him twice weekly and his father would often attempt to message him images of odd art projects he had been working on. Love was never something he felt he needed more of but at this moment there was a slight questioning in his mind. Maybe this was why he was clinging on so tight to almost strangers.

He arrived outside The Prince Charles cinema several minutes early and waited. He waited an almost painstaking amount of time. It was enough time to buy tickets for Dan and himself as well as popcorn. Time still ticked by. Phil was readying himself to go in alone and admit to the fact that he had (probably understandably) been stood up, when a lanky half stranger jogged to his side. His curling brown hair stuck down to his head. Despite the cold weather, he was sweating. Phil guessed he had been jogging for quite the while.

“Sorry, fuck. Sorry. I couldn’t find any bloody shoes. Then I forgot my Oyster card and got off at the wrong station and…” His skin began to blotch rosy.

Phil couldn’t fight the soft smile that slipped onto his face as his eyes trailed down to the other man’s shoes seeing that as he nervously shifted from one foot to the next that the bottoms of his shoes lit up a bright LED, baby blue. They reminded Phil of London at night. His clothes matched the movie posters littering the back wall of the cinema.

“It was a nice choice- the shoes,” He whispered the lightness from his smile creeping into his voice.

“They were a joke present… I promise. Only thing I could find.” He was out of breath.

“I have a shit habit of being late, I’m sorry I should have warned you. I should… set my clocks early or something,”

Phil shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in a kind of ‘no worries’ manner.

“A little less sixteen candles, a little more touch me,” Phil couldn’t help but let slip seeing Dan’s face momentarily scrunch in confusion before smirking faintly.

“I set my clocks early because I know I’m always late,” Dan quoted in a quiet, singsong like manner.

Phil nodded and laughed before holding out one of the film tickets to Dan, who seemed somehow shocked by this small gesture. Phil could see the cogs in his brain turning. He wished the other boy wouldn’t turn into himself so much. Knowing him even for a small amount of time, Phil could already tell he was overthinking the small gesture.

“I think the shoes make you look cool. Now stop saying sorry and hurry up, or we’ll really be late. I also brought us popcorn- if you want to share. But if you don’t that’s okay too.” Yep. Phil was also unsure of himself.

He liked Dan. He just didn’t know in what way yet or rather, he knew but didn’t want to admit he had fallen so quickly. It was then Phil realised he was shaking, not from the cold but instead from nerves. Dan’s blush wasn’t fading.

“I like popcorn but you didn’t have to pay,” There was something unsure there.

Maybe Phil had got things wrong. Though he wasn’t even sure what he would call tonight. When Dan didn’t take his ticket right away, still seeming in awe of it, Phil awkwardly placed it into Dan’s palm. For a moment Phil’s hand lingered there before pulling back. Maybe he was touching him too much. He needed to calm down. Still, he couldn’t help but hover a hand over the other man’s waist as they ambled into the cinema. Uncertain but longing.

***

Dan had never been called ‘cool’ before. He didn’t think his name and cool had ever been placed in the same sentence unless he was the one doing it and it was always tied to the suffix ‘un’. Dan was uncool. He had spent more than twenty years confirming this fact to himself, learning to live with it and under the dull lights of the projector at The Prince Charles cinema, he was beginning to have second thoughts.

He had the overwhelming urge to tap his fingers on the armrest, or his feet on the floor but was hyperaware that in a cinema, this would make him an utter douche. Even if they were just watching the previews he knew people could get testy. There were unspoken rules of cinema etiquette and Dan was planning to abide by them. Still, his body twitched.

He settled for bouncing his knee every few seconds or drumming his fingers on the palms of his hand in an attempt to calm himself down. He was so wrapped up in his own head he hardly realised Phil was offering him the popcorn or that the film had begun to play. He picked at the popcorn one piece at a time aware that if this were a date, as he was beginning to suspect, he needed to act polite. He needed to act a little more like a person and a little less like himself. As Dan’s internal sexual crisis was wriggling its way to the surface he tried to remind himself to be ‘cool’.

Eating on a first date in any kind of genuine way was a social faux pas. He had to be a bird, picky and uninterested. Somehow, Phil seemed to notice this tactfulness and rolled his eyes. He gave Dan’s shoulder a little nudge before he reached over and grabbed a large handful of popcorn. He held it out to Dan for a moment.

_See?_ His eyes spoke silently.

Phil then managed to shovel half of it into his mouth at once. His cheeks swell. His jaw grinds, making a slightly obnoxious crush and mash.  Dan held in a quiet laugh. That was how real people ate. So, he cut ties and did the same, watching Phil shoot him a smile and return to watching the screen.

The movie was a sea of grimy greys. Quivering violins and trembling tympany rose into an all-out musical swell. Dan was both terrified and captivated. As the music swelled louder and louder he felt a tension growing in his shoulders as on screen a woman wondered aimlessly from one corridor to the next, her breath ragged. A shadow could be seen in the foreground then the music burst into a bombastic orchestral number and the shadow began to run.

Dan heard a muffled gasp, moving and bouncing throughout the cinema only adding to his own tension. He hadn’t realised how tightly his fingers were gripped around the armrest of the seat until Phil’s hand ghosted over his own. Dan saw his knuckles had turned a reddish-purple. He loosened his grip slightly and looked over to Phil. Phil was still looking at the screen. Dan wasn’t the best with horror films but Phil looked enamoured, like he was taking everything in, his eyes unable to get wide enough.

Dan was so busy looking at him that he leapt from his skin when the violins rose to a high-pitched screech and the woman on screen began to cry. The sudden sound shocked him, his shoulders tense, his body lifting off his seat as if preparing to run. Phil looked over at Dan and smiled softly, wriggling his hand under Dan’s and giving it a small squeeze. Dan felt an eruption of butterflies. They were holding hands. Phil was holding his hand. He was holding another guys hand and he was loving it. Fuck his sexual crisis. This was nice. This was lovely.

Dan’s fingers gave a tentative squeeze as he let himself fall into the moment, the movie playing out before his eyes. He didn’t have the time to be scared. He was too busy worrying about sweaty palms and being in over his head. Phil smelled like sandalwood and coconut. Dan tried to make a mental note of this. He wanted to remember every inch of this moment.

***

“Your hands are shaking.”

Phil took Dan’s hands within his own outside of the Prince Charles cinema. Phil had the foresight to bring gloves. Dan didn’t think gloves were cool. So there Phil was, continuing his now habit of pulling Dan’s hands into his own. Phil was touching him way too much. Maybe Dan would realise that was because he liked him. If that wasn’t already obvious. Phil was trying to make it obvious, at least.

“That’s because it’s fucking freezing,” Dan chuckled before looking down shyly at his shoes, still lighting up as they strolled from the cinema back to The Tube stop.

“Sorry. About the cursing. You don’t seem to and I seem to a lot. I’m working on it.”

Dan is looking at their hands and Phil is looking at him, confusion painting over his face. He tried to think of the best way to shape his words and in doing so almost tripped over his own feet, laughing softly to himself. He was clumsy and hopeless. He wasn’t used to being like this- okay, sure he had his random bouts of tripping over his own feet and bumping into still objects but today he had managed to do all of these things several times within the block he and Dan had walked. He was really enamoured by this guy.

“You say that a lot,” Phil whispered in reply.

“That you’re working on things.”

Dan shrugged, his hands still staying awkwardly placed, like a prayer beneath Phil’s gloved hands.

“I… don’t really like the person I’ve been for a while. I’m trying to get to a place where… I don’t know. I like who I am- and where I am. I’m even working on this stupid five-year-plan thing because my psychologist recommended I give that a try… Maybe I should have also mentioned that, I see a psychologist every fortnight or so. Because I used to have depression- and well. I still have depression I guess-”

Dan was talking a little too fast, trying not to look at Phil. Phil on the other hand was just listening. His thumb rubbing circles into the back of the other boy’s hand. Dan was clearly nervous to talk about this. Phil didn’t think it was something he told a lot of people, which made him even more keen to listen.

“I don’t think it’s something you just get over, like the flu or whatever. But I’ve been trying to do all this shitty introspective, mindfulness crap. It’s kind of helping as well. But the five-year-plan thing is meant to give you something to look forward to and work towards… and I’m rambling- it’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” Phil insisted giving the boy’s shoulder a light nudge.

“So, what is it? Your five-year plan?”

Dan looked down as though he was thinking. The two of them had almost slowed walking to a stop. Neither were really in any rush to get to the train station. They stopped finally under the faded glow of a sign for a Chinese restaurant.  Phil could see Dan’s breath rising through the night air. It looked as though it was going to rain.

“I’m working on it,” Dan chuckled after a moment.

“Well, if tomorrow you woke up and money wasn’t an option- what would you want to do?” Phil asked diplomatically.

“If I could do anything?” Dan clarified.

“If you could do anything.”

“I… I would want to make things. I don’t know what. I like stories. Making them up in my head. I like music too. I’m not that good but- like the movie tonight. Fuck the soundtrack was amazing. The way it just fit the story and rose with the tension. Story and sound- you know? Fucking amazing.” 

He had that shine in his eye. The kind people got when they were talking about something they were truly passionate about. His voice smooth, his eyes shining, his dimples showing. Phil knew this was when people looked their most beautiful, most themselves when in the heat of passion. Maybe that’s why he got on with PJ so well, he was a ball of unrelenting passion. In that moment, however- Phil had seen nothing more beautiful than Dan.

“Then, instead of writing a five-year plan you should be making your motion picture soundtrack.”

This idea struck Dan silent for a moment. Something about it felt right. It was as though he had been desperately trying to shove miss matched puzzle pieces together for the better part of a year and now finally someone had given him enough perspective to point out that the puzzle in his hands didn’t match the picture on the box.

He would have to start all over again.

For once this wasn’t daunting. He seemed to gain a sense of direction with this revelation. He knew, for once where he was going. It wasn’t as clear as a location. It was more like he had been stumbling about in a dark place for far longer than he could recall and finally, he saw a light to head towards.

“Maybe you’re right.”

Phil was still holding Dan’s hand between his gloved hands. He pulled the boy’s hands up to his cheeks, the only bit of his own bare skin that wasn’t covered. Dan’s hands still felt like ice. He clasped the boy’s hands in his own again and began blowing hot air into them.

“Maybe we should get inside somewhere before you get frostbite,” Phil pointed out hoping Dan would still want this night to continue. He didn’t want them to leave just yet.

“We could go to my flat, if you want. It’s not far. Watch a few more films- or something,” Dan offered, surprising himself with the offer.

“Sounds like a plan,”

If Dan were to pick a point of no return, an event horizon, maybe he would pick this. There had been plenty of moments before this which might have fallen under the same definition but up until now Dan always seemed to have the opportunity to stop things. After this night, he had reached the point of no return. Everything that would come after, would do so.

This was his last hope at familiarity and normally but in that moment, all of it was gone.


	8. Staccato

**_Year 1 – February_ **

_The first girl Daniel James Howell kissed had not been his first love. However, she had been his first fascination. Kissing her was like licking the bottom of an ashtray. She had been older than him and smoked like someone who hadn’t been told smoking could kill you. She had a pink streak in her hair. Dan had thought she was cool, for about ten seconds. He hadn’t really liked his first kiss._

_The first girl Philip Michael Lester kissed had tasted like cinnamon. He had been older than most when he had his first kiss and he was sure he was in love. This lasted for about two months. She then moved away for university and for whatever reason long distance didn’t seem to appeal. Maybe he hadn’t loved her as much as he thought he had._

_Right now, he knew she was married and had two kids, one boy and one girl. It was a miracle what you could dig up on Facebook. He couldn’t remember why he had been looking in the first place. He was glad she was happy but her life in perspective to his own made him feel aged and outdated. He felt like a phone too old to upgrade. Should he be married by now? Should he have kids? What if he didn’t want that at all? Was he somehow less of a person for thinking so?_

_The first guy Phil had kissed had been later still. He was in his second week of university, hanging around with a group of friends he no longer talked to. There was no real reason for this, they had just never had much in common other than a lodging place and similar career paths. They had gone to a club. Phil had gotten a little too drunk and kissed a boy._

_Upon waking the next morning this fact had astounded him but in the weeks, that followed he almost got comfortable with the idea. It wasn’t a bad thing or that big of a deal at the time. He would liken it to seeing a film and suddenly realising it was your new favourite movie. It wasn’t as though you liked your previous favourite movie any less, you just found something you liked slightly more._

_He ended up meeting the same guy several more times throughout his first year of university but in his second year, he finally gained the clarity that, the fact they both liked men was about the only thing the two had in common. He had tasted like sweat and bar peanuts._

_Dan wasn’t sure if he had ever kissed a guy. Maybe when he was drunk or dared but they had been so half-hearted they could hardly count. There was one kiss though, that he could hardly remember in clarity. He wasn’t sure it even happened. It felt more like a dream and less like a memory. So, he was almost certain that didn’t count._

_***_

Dan had never been self-conscious about his apartment flat but with Phil seeing it for the first-time Dan was suddenly looking at the place with fresh eyes. It was sizable enough for one but slightly messy. It was the type of haphazard mess that came with having very little time on your hands. He had suit jackets thrown over the backs of chairs and video game controllers still scattered about the floor.

He was wondering what his place said about him. The whole place had a monochrome feeling with the piano tucked into the corner of his lounge room and his meticulous display of boxset DVDs, novels and albums on most available surfaces. He realised that it spoke volumes about him and instantly felt exposed. Phil had looked around, but he hadn’t lingered. He had instead turned to Dan and kept their conversation going. The night bleeds from deep blue to faded yellow as the two retired to the sofa.

Dan fits himself into his sofa crease while Phil sat only inches away from him. It was the type of close that left Dan wondering. In the cinema, the space between them had already been set, this time it was Phil showing his own comfort boundaries. It was so close their knees and shoulders would often brush, touch and sink into one another’s. He was normally the type of person who loved personal space but for once, he didn’t care. They watched both volumes of _Kill Bill_ since he and Phil both liked the film.

Dan wasn’t sure when it happened but Phil’s arm was slung over his shoulder. He liked it. It felt quietly comfortable. He let his body sink into the other boy’s. He felt sleep boring deep into him but he didn’t want the night to end. He had stopped watching the film for a moment and instead found himself occupied fiddling with Phil’s fingers.

Next, they put on _Drive_ it was another surprise that both boys liked the film. Phil particularly looked surprised that Dan owned a copy of the DVD.

“It doesn’t seem like your type of film,” Dan noted when Phil proclaimed his love for it.

“Are you kidding me it’s amazing. I bet you like it for the soundtrack.”

Dan felt seen in the strangest of ways because the guess was pretty spot on. His mouth twitched into a smile.

“How did you guess?” Phil shrugged slightly, sipping on a coffee he had made earlier in the night, he too must have been tired.

“I thought it was obvious. It has one of the best scores I’ve heard. It just… does.” Dan is nodding without realising it.

Dan would see the influence Nicolas Winding Refn visuals had on Phil’s filmmaking when he stayed over Phil’s house and watched some of his own films the following week, the use of colour and how a scene was set up. But Dan was getting ahead of himself. On that night, they were cuddled up on the sofa, watching _Drive_ while the sun came up until the room was truly filled to the brim with its yellow glow.  

In the early light of the morning both boys became hyper-aware that their time was running low, and still, both seemed to want to delay it. While the credits rolled for the film, Phil’s eyes trailed over to the piano.

“Can you play?” He asked quietly, Dan then became hyperaware of how little space there was between the two of them, how close their faces had become.

“I can. I don’t know if I would say I’m any good. But yeah, I can play.”

Phil stifled a yawn and placed his now empty cup on the coffee table. He shifted his position away from Dan, stretching slightly his bones and joints creaking and groaning from staying in one place for so long.

“Show me?” He asked, then seemed to think it was too forward.

“I mean, if you want to,” he recovered.

Dan smiled and stretched, the hem of his shirt riding up to exposed a crescent moon of his pale flesh for a moment. Either Dan was imagining things or Phil’s eyes were lingering.

“I will, but you have to promise you won’t make fun of me for how shit I am.”

Dan stood up sleepily walking over to the piano, pulling up another seat so Phil could sit beside him. Phil nodded enthusiastically and crossed his heart as he took the seat beside Dan.

Dan began to play, his fingers hesitant at first. He made a few stupid mistakes that Phil didn’t seem to notice. His fingers then began to dance over the keys. Dan felt himself be absorbed by the moment, the keys, notes, scales, songs. Chords snapped into an arpeggio. Notes swapped and changed from staccato to legato. It had been so long since he played for anyone.

As morning light shone through his curtains and the sun greeted early morning London, the flat was filled to bursting with music. Each note wrapped against the walls. They bounced and reverberated like a multiball jackpot, spinning about a pinball machine. Even when he stopped playing it took a second for the music to drain from the room.

Dan now turned his attention to Phil. His eyes were so close. His pupils swollen. His bottom lip snagged between his teeth. Dan had an overwhelming urge to do something he would instantaneously regret. Still, he longed for regret, preferring it to never knowing at all.

“You’re really good,” Phil breathed his eyes both locked on Dan and yet looking anywhere but directly at him. He was looking through him to avoid any direct eye contact. It was an odd kind of vulnerable.

Phil moves closer and Dan has reached deep space. All the air is sucked from his lungs and he thinks his head might implode. Phil’s hand ghosts over his cheek and Dan is second-guessing everything, his brain working a hundred miles an hour.

Was Phil about to kiss him? Maybe. Did he want to kiss Phil? Definitely. What does this mean for his sexual crisis? He doesn’t fucking know but he can’t bring himself to care in that moment. Why is he taking so long? Why is he just looking? Why doesn’t he just-

Dan leans forward, closing the limited gap between them. He presses his lips to Phil’s his heart in his mouth, his body screaming. He has kissed people before, obviously. He had thought kisses were insignificant. They were just the meshing of mouths and the swapping of spit. A social expectation. He had never had the type of kiss movies and books promised. The earth-shattering, time stopping kind of kiss.

This was that. For a moment.

Phil’s lips moved with his own for a moment, two, three then he felt the other man pull back, turn his face to the side. Dan’s heart shattered. He wished it had done so quietly. He felt as though it had gone down in a thunderous racket, felt as though Phil would have heard it explode from where he sat. Dan prayed he wasn’t hit by the shrapnel in its wake.

Phil had moved away but only slightly. His face was still resting in a nook at Dan’s neck. Phil’s breath was ragged and heavy against his flesh. It was both warm and chilling. His body erupted in gooseflesh. Dan wasn’t breathing at all.

Why did he pull back?

He pulled back further still. Breaking all contact. They were continents cracking and drifting apart. Phil was inches away now but it might as well have been oceans.

“You- um. You had an eyelash on your cheek,” Phil croaked out, his voice wavering, muffled by his hand which now passed over his mouth. He could be a stock image of surprise and shock.

Dan didn't know what to say, what to do. It was evident that Phil didn’t either because he wasn’t speaking. He looked as if he had so much to say, all of which was stuck in his throat.

“I…” Phil attempted to start but nothing came of it.

They were both looking anywhere but at each other.

“I shouldn’t have done that. Fuck sorry,” Dan fumbled after he feared the silence would consume him.

“I think you better go,” He then continued, cursing himself because he had royally fucked up whatever the two had going on. But Phil had wanted it too, hadn’t he? He looked as though he had. Dan was sure he had wanted it too.

“Dan,” Soothing. Phil was being soothing now. Dan was so fucking embarrassed.

“It wasn’t that I- I just… I didn’t know if-”

“Please don’t” Dan really didn’t want to have to sit through Phil making up some lame excuse or apology.

“I just… I think you better go.”  

And he did. Just like that. He went.

He didn’t fight. Didn’t push to stay. Dan didn’t know what made him think he would.

He was so confused.

***

In the hours that followed it was the quiet contemplation which kept Dan from sleeping despite his body’s sleep-starved state. He felt idiotic, confused and honestly, more than a little embarrassed. He knew Dodie was only a hallway away and that Louise, even in the early hour was just a phone call. He didn’t bother either of them.

Some part of him wanted to talk to the stranger, the one he had been writing to. It seemed strange that they were the first person he wanted to tell but in their brief conversation, he felt as though he knew them, what they liked and disliked. Then again, he thought he knew Phil and in turn, thought he wanted the same thing. He felt stupid and confused.

Confused was the word of the hour. He kept looking back on the night’s events, reflecting upon what had happened, trying to dissect every moment and where he had interpreted his and Phil’s interactions so wrong.

Was Phil straight? He hadn’t said. Was he just not into Dan? If he wasn’t then why did he hold Dan’s hand and put his arm around him? Why did he ask him out in the first place? Why did he go back to Dan’s place?

Why?

That was the word of the hour. Why, why, why?

He was mentally spiralling.

He had crawled into bed, still fully dressed, still marinated in rejection and internal conflict. This was a turn he hadn’t seen the night taking. He had gone out on a limb and felt it snap beneath his feet.

He didn’t know how much time passed, enough time for him to call himself pathetic at least twenty-six times. He kept debating whether he should sleep or get up and attempt to do something productive, maybe he could get a head start on some work. He knew that would be a feeble attempt at distraction. Inevitably, sleep won over.

***

The world is baby blue and tilted. Everything is both too close and too far. It was as though Dan’s life was being viewed from inside a fishbowl. Everything was distorted. Everything wriggled and bubbled.

He watched figures drift by him, ghosts of barely there memories. Their faces all smudged and blurred. It was then a familiar face came into his field of vision. Blue eyes filled the universe of baby blue. Where walls ended and eyes began was debatable. They were Phil’s blue eyes.

“Hey,” Phil’s voice cut through the muffled madness.

“Hi,” Dan countered. He felt dizzy and wasn’t altogether sure why.

The room the spinning. Dan’s fingers closed and gripped carpet, it was then he realised he was sitting down. His body sagged against the wall behind him, possibly the only thing keeping him upright.  Music throbbed now, still sounding as though it were rising from the sea.

“Sorry about the noise,” Dan wasn’t sure why he was apologising. One side of Phil’s mouth tugged up into a half smirk.

“I was going to call the cops,” He countered.

“I wish you would.”

And then he was no longer in a hallway but instead on The Tube, the world a million shades of late-night technicolour. Everything still felt strange, far away. The world zoomed past his whole body rocking with the sway of the train. It was loud. He was in a train, drowning in a sea of strangers. No, he wasn’t. Not really. Phil was still there.

Dan’s head was slumped against Phil’s shoulder. At this point, Phil was a stranger. He had been a total stranger. Maybe Dan had been getting ahead of himself from the start. Maybe this was point A.

Phil’s lips were moving but Dan didn’t hear the words. People around them were moving but he couldn’t make out their faces. The train was moving but Dan couldn’t read the signs for the stations.

Everything was blurry. The scene faded.

He was in a room, one he didn’t know. He could hear a constant flicking, a click and hum. The room smelled of sandalwood and coconut, of Chinese food and old paper.

Dan found himself staring in awe at a clicking projector, printing technicoloured images against the fleshy white wall. The projector painted the wall red with vermillion blush. It then spun through several colours. Red. Blue. Green. He watched in a trance.

He pressed his fingers into the wall for a long moment, as though he could ground himself, clear the image. Everything rose and swelled around him. This was his life in staccato. Everything felt fractured and detached. He was scrambling to pluck puzzle pieces from the sky and force them together into some coherent image.  

“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?” His own voice cut through everything finally there was clarity.

Phil was still there, just out of Dan’s field of view. He wasn’t sure how he knew this but he just knew. He felt like an actor playing out a scene already set for him. He just didn’t know his lines.

“Yeah,” Soothing. Phil was being soothing.

“But does that make it any less real?”

A dream. A memory. A mashing of worlds.

***

Daniel James Howell sat bolt upright in his bed. The clothes he had worn the previous day hugged close to his body, stuck there was sweat. The memory of his strange dream was already fading, filling instead with the events of the previous night. Again, he felt hurt and confusion.

On his bedside table, his phone began to ring. It was Phil. Of course, it was.

Against his better judgment, Dan answered.


	9. Point A: A Side

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is just a little forewarning, this chapter does have mentions of depression. Also, originally I intended to have only one chapter called 'Point A' but I quickly realised that all the things I needed to get through would be far too much to fit into one chapter so it has been split into two parts (Point A: A Side and Point A: B Side). Lastly, if you are someone who enjoys listening to music while reading, some songs which either influence this chapter or I listened to while writing this chapter include I Want You and Good for You by Third Eye Blind, Let Down by Radiohead, Alan by Perfume Genius, Your New Twin Sized Bed by Death Cab for Cutie and We Don't Deserve Love by Arcade Fire. Again thank you all for reading.

_“There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.”_

_-Chuck Palahniuk_

**_Day 1 – January_ **

_Before?_

_Before this moment. There were no other moments. This might be a slight over exaggeration. Of course, there were other moments but these other moments only matter as the effect they had on the person these things had happened to. Everything before this moment didn’t need a story. But this moment. This moment was an oversight._

_Maybe the beginning of the story had been getting ahead of itself._

_This was the best place to start. This was the true point A. This was the beginning of our story._

***

Daniel James Howell was in the slump to end all slumps. He was thinking about life in general. He was thinking about his shitty job, his shitty flat, his shitty life. He was in a tailspin.

These tailspins often came at the beginning of each year. He would reflect upon what had happened that year, what he achieved. He would question if what he did was worth anything on a big picture scale. He would wonder if anything anyone did really mattered at all. He wondered if everyone was just dust floating in space, trying to convince a universe that didn’t give a shit that they were a speck of dust that mattered.

He was wondering if happiness was just a state of complete and utter ignorance. People who were always happy thought that what they were doing mattered, that they could change something. Dan was convinced some people just weren’t born to be happy. He was convinced he was one of these people.

He had been on anti-depressants for the better part of that year. They hadn’t done too much for his own mental health. He realised he was one of the unfortunate people who the drugs just didn’t work for. He had quit taking them, cold turkey three days before. He hadn’t told his doctor about this because he knew she would ask him to try them for just a little bit longer, or attempt to swap them over for something that would likely be equally as useless.

So, he had just stopped taking them. He would rather be miserable and sober than a non-feeling zombie constantly feeling as though he ate his own brains for breakfast. He was sick of being numb.

It was the first week in January and his friend Dodie was throwing a party at her flat. Somehow Dan had gotten dragged into the event. She always managed to get him to come. This night was different to most though, she and Louise were sticking close to him. They normally all drifted through parties, saying hello and gliding off to their own self-respected groups but tonight Dodie and Louise were worried about him.

Dan was drinking, a lot.

This was an atypical behaviour. On other nights, he would be lucky to have anything to drink at all but tonight he needed something. He found himself talking to people, though their conversation was mostly a blur.

Dodie talked to him about the music she was working on while Louise was talking about having another kid, what did Dan think about it? Dan answered something to the effect of, ‘it doesn’t matter’. Louise had then gone very quiet. A girl named Sarah and a boy named Bertie were talking about filmmaking at university. Dan quickly got bored of the conversations.

The music was suddenly too loud and the room too crowded. He managed to shake Dodie and Louise and find a moment of solitude in the hallway between his and Dodie’s apartments. He sat on the floor his eyes fixated on the bottom of a red wine bottle he had nicked from the refreshments table. He didn’t even like wine but it didn’t matter. The things he did like and once craved didn’t seem to satisfy him either. He felt hollow. He took a long swig then tucked his legs to his chest. He was going to throw up.

It felt as though the room were swaying and spinning. It was as though he had suddenly climbed on a boat in the midst of choppy waters, or decided to climb on a tilt-a-whirl. Everything felt fuzzy around the edges.

It was then that his own little island of solitude was shattered by the chatter of several men leaving the room a few doors up. Dan craned his head up and instantly recognised Chris. He was a friend of Dan’s, though not the close kind. It was the kind of friendship adults often had. They used to be very close, Chris being the only other person in the area Dan knew besides Dodie when he had moved from university to his flat. But time and differing schedules had pushed them apart to only occasionally speaking or meeting up at the odd party since they still seemed to run in the same circles.

They both seemed too busy to really make time for one another, but that was okay. People changed and grew. One thing Dan had learned with age was that his life was going to be a revolving door of people walking in and out, often without much warning. That was life.  

Chris wasn’t alone. He was followed by two other men Dan didn’t know. On any other night, he would have had the common sense not to stare but on this night, he was tired. He felt like something buried deep within his chest had died. He was morning the loss of it. Whatever it was.

His eyes caught the brilliant blue eyes of a stranger. The stranger stopped. Chris and the other man who was with the two continued walking down the hall. They were deep in conversation. Dan couldn’t hear what they were talking about over the pulsing music spilling into the hall from Dodie’s apartment. The stranger lingered.

“Are you okay?” He asked, his voice somehow clear amongst the chaos of the noise both in the hallway and in his head.

Dan scoffed. It seemed like the only honest answer he could give. He shook his head his eyes finally breaking contact with the blue-eyed stranger. He looked deep into the bottle clasped between his hands as if it somehow held answers. It did not.

_I’m fine_

That’s what Dan meant to say. What he wanted to say. What any sane person would say.

“I feel like my head is falling apart from the inside,” Is what he really said. Which sounded mental.

A stranger wouldn’t care. Why should they?

“At least if it’s only falling apart on the inside you won’t stain the carpet. It already has enough of those,” The stranger chuckled and to Dan’s surprise, he moved from the opposite side of the hall to the spot beside Dan. He sunk down and sat beside him. Dan found himself chuckling dryly.

“Was that a joke?” Dan was caught on blue eyes, pale skin, pointed nose, knowing smile.

“It was, a bad one I’m guessing.”

Dan smiled faintly and sunk slightly further down the wall, almost spilling the sloshing wine. The other man took it from him and placed it on the other side of himself to avoid it spilling. Dan was swaying more than he realised.

“What brings you here?” The other man asked seeming to try and make conversation.

“Here- like London or the apartment complex, or drinking on the floor outside my friend’s flat?” Dan countered.

The stranger shot him something like a sympathetic smile. Dan didn’t really want sympathy. He looked away.

“Mostly the last one,” The stranger replied.

“A complicated story ending with I don’t want to be at a party right now but I also don’t want to be home alone. So… here I am,” He gestured to his spot on the floor pulling his legs even closer to his chest. He felt like he was going to throw up. He knew he was going to throw up. He didn’t know what difference drinking on the floor in the hallway made to drinking at home alone in his flat. Surely there was some.

“And what are you going to do after you’re done sitting on the floor?” He had such blue eyes. Dan would call him Blue.

“I think I need some air,” He confessed after the silence sat so long it became rigid and uncomfortable.

The boy nodded and reached down for his phone seeming to send a text to someone. If Dan were to guess he would say it was to the two men he was meant to have left with. Surely by now, they realised he wasn’t following at their heels.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

A random stranger was asking Dan to go to some secluded area with him. What could go wrong?  In his deep stupor, he didn’t really care what the night brought. Even if it was against his better judgment, even if any other sane and sober person would have denied the request, Dan couldn’t bring himself to care.

Dan struggled to a standing position almost tripping over his own feet in the process. The other man grabbed his forearm and held him upright. He only touched Dan as much as he needed. Once Dan was steady on his feet the man let go.

“Yeah,” Dan finally replied.

“Might as well.”

***

Philip Michael Lester ended up on the roof with a complete stranger. The man seemed to be having a bad night, likely one of many. Something in his chest wouldn’t let him leave the man alone. Maybe it was the fear of what he might do if he were left alone.

They sat together, both shivering. The air sliced against the exposed skin of Phil’s face feeling like glass through flesh, rough and raw. The other boy didn’t seem to notice how violently he was trembling. The alcohol had numbed his senses. He was going to get pneumonia.

“Are you ready to go inside yet?” Phil asked, his words almost drowned out by the wind and the chatter of his teeth. The roof smelled slightly of vomit. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant place to stay.

“Not yet,” He answered shaking his head.

Phil shrugged off his jacket, the purple and pink mix of a puffy, galaxy daydream and slung it over the stranger’s shoulders. He quietly pulled the coat tighter around his body. His cheeks were a flustered and blotchy red. Phil didn’t know what to talk about. He looked up past the city and to the sky. He wished he could see the stars. The other boy followed his line of sight and seemed to smirk.

“Fuck light pollution.” He blurted out, causing Phil to scoff.

“Yeah,” He breathed, watching his breath pool at his lips like smoke.

“Do you know any constellations?” Phil asked noticing the man seemed to be sobering up enough to hold a conversation. He had taken his bottle from the hall back to the rooftop but he had hardly sipped from it while they sat against the cool night sky.

“Not really. Sometimes I like to make them up though.” He tilted his head in the direction of a dull cluster of stars.

“That looks like the Triforce from Zelda.”

Phil smirked looking at them. They kind of did, if you squinted and tilted your head a particular direction. He looked around at the other clusters of stars trying to put an image together in his head.

“That one kind of looks like a squirrel,” The man looked over. His fringe was straightened down flat and fell into his eyes. It almost matched Phil’s hair, only a few shades lighter.

“You say that like you have something against squirrels,” He scoffed causing Phil to fake a shiver.

“I got attacked by one once, it was bloody horrible.”

The man chuckled flashing a dimpled grin. Phil was captivated by it. He spent far too long staring at it but the man didn’t seem to notice. He was back to looking outward at the sky. His eyes were still slightly glazed over.

“I think it looks more like a bear than a squirrel,” He countered after a long inspection of the image.

He then laid down on the roof, shutting his eyes. For a long time, he said nothing. Phil didn’t push him. He just pulled his eyes back down to late night London. He hoped PJ and Chris would understand him staying behind. PJ had some strange film he was thinking of making. Somehow Phil had been roped in. He had a sneaking suspicion this was going to become a common occurrence. The man finally broke the silence.

“I don’t want to go back there.”

“Do you want me to take you home?” Phil had no idea how far away his home was but Phil was sure he could get there.

“No,” This answer came quickly.

“I don’t want to go home.”

Again, there was a long and palpable silence. Phil made the next offer without truly thinking,

“Would you like to come home with me? It’s not too far from here. Maybe some distance will help you clear your head.”

The man was silent for a long while. Phil could see him thinking, see the cogs in his brain turning. He watched the man nuzzle deeper into his coat and felt a pang in his chest.

“Yeah, okay.”

_Okay,_ Phil thought.

_Okay_.

***

On that particular London night, the first train Phil had boarded with the stranger had been packed, like most late-night London trains. The connecting train, however, had been different. It was quiet, eerily so.

The other man seemed to have fallen back into his own head, his eyes slightly glazed over, locked forward, hardly blinking. Sometimes Phil couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking, seeing creases of worry bore lines into his young face. He was younger than Phil, he suspected but when he did this he could have looked older. Other times Phil wondered if the boy was even there at all. It looked as though the lights were on, but nobody was home.

He watched as the man’s eyes fluttered shut, his head lulling from one side to the next before it settled to rest squarely on Phil’s shoulder. He felt a flutter in his stomach and looked down at the other man, pulling his jacket, which had begun to slip from the stranger’s shoulders back into place. He was surprised when he looked up and caught the eye of an older woman sitting a few seats away from them. She shot him a faint smile before looking away.

Phil blushed as the stranger stirred, his eyes fluttering open and glancing up at Phil. He didn’t move. That was the most surprising thing to Phil. For some reason, he expected him to recoil, but he didn’t. He just looked, gaze lingering. They were practically the unblinking eyes of a child. Wide baby brown eyes. There was something special about brown eyes.

Phil brushed a strand of hair from the man’s face watching as his eyes fluttered shut again. This time he nuzzled his face deep into Phil’s shoulder. He felt warm all over.

***

“We have to go now.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Come on.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Carry me.”

“I can’t carry you.”

“Can’t or don’t want to?”

“Bit of both, now come on or I’ll leave you.”

“You won’t. I can tell… Okay. Don’t look at me like that. Fine.”

***

Philip Michael Lester had his arm hooked around the waist of a stranger. He was practically dragging him the distance between the train station and Phil’s apartment. It wasn’t a turn he had anticipated for his night to take but of course, being Phil Lester entailed certain obligations and expectations. He was a magnet for lost strangers, for strange or lonely people. They came out of the woodwork and flocked to him.

Phil didn’t particularly think this man was strange. He did, however, think he was lost. It was written all over his face, his eyes. It pulled at empathetic organs Phil hadn’t known existed but it was more than just empathy. Phil saw himself in this man. He didn’t know how to put it into words. It wasn’t like looking at a mirror, nothing at all like that. They were very different people.

Instead, looking at this stranger was like looking at a piece of himself. It was as though this stranger was a phantom limb Phil had only now begun to feel. He had met plenty of lost strangers, talk to all sorts of people despite his mild social phobias but this was different. It was such a strange feeling to have for only knowing the man such a short time.

Phil decided to point out each landmark on the way from the station to his place. It seemed almost inevitable that if this man stayed the night he would not be there in the morning. Phil wasn’t sure how he knew this but something in his chest clenched and twisted at the thought. He wasn’t psychic but his intuition rang strong on this fact. People walked in and out of his life. That was how the world worked. He was leaving the door open for this man to steel off into the night without a goodbye. That didn’t mean Phil wanted it to happen but in his many years of existence, he had learned that expecting people to go was a way he could avoid getting hurt.

“This café is about the halfway point between the train station and my place. They can brew up a good coffee and the place next door does the best Chinese takeout this side of London.”

The other man watched him speak, even paused for a second to admire the place as if committing it to memory. Phil wasn’t sure he would remember any of this in the morning. Maybe a part of him would. Maybe Phil was hoping too strongly for something that would never come.

The man’s fingers were shoved deep into the pockets of Phil’s jacket. His cheeks blushed a violent pink almost matching the colour of the material. Phil had the urge to touch his cheek but pushed it down. He couldn’t take advantage of some poor drunk stranger. That wasn’t the type of person he was.

Without his jacket, his body was exposed to the biting chill of winter. It wasn’t snowing, thankfully but the ground was covered with a thin layer of slush, soaking through his boots and to his socks. Phil felt his body trembling as he pointed out a comic book shop in the street before his own. The other boy’s eyes watch him carefully, as though some sobriety was beginning to sink in.

“Are you cold?” He questioned his gaze locked on Phil’s. Phil simply shook his head.

“I’m a Northerner. We’re tougher than you posh Southerners.”        

The other man shot him a look of genuine offence before roughly shoving Phil’s shoulder sending them both tumbling into the slush of melting snow.

“I’m not posh. I’m just educated git,” The man cackled, his shoulders convulsing in trembles. Phil wasn’t sure if this was due to the cold or his outburst of laughs.

“Well it wasn’t very educated of you to shove us in the snow, was it?” Phil shot back through chattering teeth and shivering shoulders.

He felt the cold seep down under his skin, wrap around his bones and cling there. The other man was too intoxicated to notice. He hadn’t made an attempt to move. Instead, he had laid there looking up to the stars. Phil watched the city lights reflect in his eyes. His eyes held the world under a purple, blue light cast by a glowing neon sign. Phil wanted to film this moment. It was a moment he wanted to flash over film screens or paint on the inside of his eyelids.

Phil broke the moment, pulling both him and the other man back to a standing position, watching as he scooted closer to Phil, practically tucking himself under Phil’s arm. Maybe he did feel the cold after all.

“You’re shivering,” The man commented cupping Phil’s hands between his own and rubbing them roughly as he attempted to generate heat. The man was attempting to shrug off his jacket but Phil shook his head quickly.

“Keep it, my place isn’t far from here.”

At this, the brown-eyed boy shot him a sideways smirk. It was a cheeky and childlike smirk.

“Is it that building at the end of the street?” The man asked, smile not fading.

“Yeah, that one.”

“Race you there.”

The man burst into a run and for a moment Phil forgot the man had been lonely, forgot everything about the deep sadness that bloomed like flowers in the spring behind his eyes. He looked like a child. He was careless, happy, free. Momentarily. Then he toppled over again, careening into a lamppost, shaking him to his bones.

He was hopeless.

Phil’s heart, awoke in that moment, beating with the wings of butterflies and birds. He ran to help the boy to his feet again.

At that moment, Phil thought he may have fallen in a totally different manner.


	10. Point A: B Side

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: If anyone was curious as to the Muse song mention in this chapter, I had the song 'Unintended' in mind while writing it.

**_Day 1 – January_ **

Daniel James Howell was in the house with a stranger. He had thought he would be sobered up and regretting his decisions by the time they had finally arrived at the stranger’s house but he must have been drunker than he first anticipated. All the lights still wore halos and everything he knew to be true still wore a look of falsehood he couldn’t wrap his head around. It was as though he was only half there. Time was another mystery altogether. Sometimes it moved very slowly, other times it seemed like he blinked and hours had passed. ‘ _Now’_ was a blurry concept.

“Your place has lots of room,” Dan blurted out at one point as he paced the floor of the main living area.

The other man buzzed about the house. Dan watched time melt as he was stripped down to his boxers, the rest of his clothes soaked through with cold water. A little time later he found himself somewhat clothed, in a loose-fitting tee shirt and sweatpants. There was a blanket wrapped snugly around his shoulders. He heard the rumbling of a tumble dryer droning in the otherwise silent apartment flat. The other man was now in the kitchen, the door open so he could still watch Dan. He thought the boy was making him a tea. Dan wasn’t sure how he knew. Maybe the other man had told him. He forgot.

The man had a record player. Dan fucking loved music. Even when he hated almost everything. Music didn’t necessarily make misery less miserable but somehow it seemed to make it more meaningful. Dan sat on the floor flipping through the records. If he was in his right mind he would realise this was intrusive, but he wasn’t in his right mind.

The other man was by his side, tapping his shoulder and handing his tea over. Dan set it to one side and placed on a Muse record unable to believe the other man even had a Muse record. He had good taste.

“Do you know how to dance?” He asked looking over his shoulder at the other man who looked as though Dan had just asked him to strip or something equally as invasive.

“How do you dance to Muse?” He asked and Dan laughed, having not thought of that. He skimmed through the track list and smirked.

“Why don't you answer the question? I’ll show you.”

“I can’t dance,” The other man admitted.

“Good, neither can I.” Dan chuckled almost kicking over the tea he had put aside.

Dan put on a slower song and chuckled at the look the man gave him. For some reason, the laugh seemed to loosen him. Dan felt slightly lighter than he had earlier in the night. He didn’t remember why he was so upset. All he knew is that he was warm and drunk. He knew it was a night for dancing because the rest of him felt like falling apart.

Dan quickly learned that the man wasn’t lying about his inability to dance. That was okay. Dan was drunk and didn’t particularly care what he looked like when he tried to dance. It was a slow song. He rested his hands on the other man’s shoulder just swaying slightly from one side to the next. The world spun around them and set him off balance. He almost careened the two of them into the man’s bookshelf. This earned an exasperated, wheezing laugh from the man. The other man, Blue, steadied them.

“You’re worse than I am,” He pointed out causing Dan to scoff.

“No fucking way.”

“Yes… hecking way.”

Dan removed a hand from the man’s shoulder trying to hide the ugly snort which burst from him. Fuck. He couldn’t remember being so happy. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe cutting out his pills cold turkey had him a little loopy. Maybe it was a mixture of many things.

“Hecking? What kind of PG bullshit?”

“Just say fuck,” The man shook his head.

“Come on. Say it and I’ll let you lead.”

The man sucked his bottom lip between his teeth clearly considering it.

“No… fucking way.”

The other man’s voice fell to almost a whisper when he cursed but Dan’s face instantly burst into a look of pure pleasure. It was a wicked kind of pleasure. The kind of pleasure you got from seeing young children flip someone off or seeing a dick get told off in a queue. Dan could have jumped for joy but he was almost sure he would fall over.

“Okay, fuck yes. Wait. I want to do a spin first.”

The man looked more than a little dubious but there was humour in his blue eyes. Truly this moment was one Dan would never forget. He had thought so at the time, at least.

“No wa-” Dan spun him.

Somehow, he managed to do it somewhat gracefully. He had to almost stand on his tiptoes to do so and in turn, almost fell but he didn’t send the other man careening into any of his furniture. So, Dan counted it as a win.

The other man was rolling his eyes and leading their steps as the song faded. It was then the two stood, saying nothing, neither moved. They both hovered close to one another. Dan wasn’t sure what was meant to happen next. He didn’t know why he had come to the man’s apartment at all. Maybe he was slowly going crazy. Maybe this night was his own self-destructive tendencies kicking into high gear. They had stopped dancing but the room still spun.

“I think maybe I should…” He felt his knees start to buckle beneath him. The other man was quick to catch him before he hit the ground.

“You should lay down for a bit,” He noted in a cautious tone.

“You can sleep in the spare room. I’ll just have to move some stuff off the bed. It’s a bit of a mess,” He confessed leading Dan into his hallway, his grip vice tight as though he were scared that letting Dan go would lead to him falling on his face. Dan wasn’t altogether sure it wouldn’t lead to that.

The room was a breeding ground for cables and film equipment. A dumping ground for unsorted rolls of film and USB drives. Dan sat down on the edge of the bed as the man cleared the space, pulling a projector from the walkway and shoving it at the far end of the bed. Dan found his fingers wandering over to an old VHS style video camera. Dan was surprised anyone still owned one of these.

He picked it up as the man was busy unhooking cables from the headboard. He looked through the viewfinder and pressed record. To his surprise, it still worked. He pointed the camera at the man who had given up trying to untangle the knotted coil and had instead resulted in annoyed and furious tugging with little rhyme or reason.

“You’re hopeless,” Dan snickered.

The man looked up, pulling a face when he saw the camera in Dan’s hand before shying away from it.

“Don't film me,” He groaned but made no move to take it away from Dan. He didn’t sound irritated, so Dan kept filming him.

“Always the cameraman, never the… camera?” Blue laughed at this.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not the saying.”

“You’re mum’s the saying.” This time they both laughed.

“Yeah,” The man scoffed.

“Whatever you say.”

Dan had the overwhelming urge to do something stupid. He moved closer to the other man testing the waters of how he would react. He didn’t move away so Dan came closer again. He tugged the hem of the boy’s shirt and pulled him closer. Dan was drunk and weak but the other man still came closer, so he must have wanted it too. Dan wasn’t sure what he was filming anymore. He wasn’t looking. Probably just bedsheets or tee shirts.

“Come sleep with me,” Dan’s voice came out in a begging childlike manner.

The man reached over, switched the camera off and set it on the nightstand.

“That’s not a smart idea. We might do something stupid.”

“I want to do something stupid,” Dan was biting his lip. He was flirting.

What did that even mean? He didn’t have enough clarity or cognition to expand on this thought. He had been feeling nothing for so long. This made him feel something, want something. They could do this and they could be happy. Fuck consequences. The other man’s blue eyes were helpless.

“No, you don’t,” The man countered.

“Yes, I do.”  Blue considered this for a moment.

“A yes now doesn’t mean a yes later. Talk to me about it tomorrow.”

Dan was stubborn. His lower lip jutting out as he considered his options.

“So… it wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no. Which means you want to.” He didn’t need to say it. Dan’s eyes instantly brightened.

“It’s a soft maybe,” The man chuckled, shaking his head as though he couldn’t believe what was happening. It was a musical laugh, to Dan at least.

“Soft maybe?”

The man took a sharp intake of breath as though he had just committed himself to an idea. Dan didn’t know what he was thinking but he could read the look of deep concentration on the other man’s face, followed by a slumping of shoulders as though he had come to a quiet resolution. He moved closer, impossibly closer.

The man was kissing him. A quick but deep kiss. His hands locked in Dan’s hair. At this late time of night, his hair was beginning to curl, finally coming alive after being flat ironed within an inch of its life. He still didn’t know this man’s name and he was the first boy Dan had kissed. He tasted like coconut lip balm.

Dan’s hands locked behind the man’s neck. The kiss moved from his lips to his jaw down to his neck. The slight stubble of the man’s jaw scratched against his skin. It was a strange sensation. Dan let out a bizarre strangled sound between a laugh and a cough. The man pulled away with a puzzled look painting over his face.

“I have a neck thing,” Dan confessed faking a shiver. The man pulled away with a wheezing laugh, his eyes crinkling, teeth showing.

“A neck thing?” He passed a hand over the place he had just kissed. Dan batted his hand away.

“Piss off,” He scolded before both men fell into a fit of noiseless laughter.

The laughter came and went like a sun shower. It came quickly and left just as swiftly, leaving little to no evidence that it had ever come in the first place. They fell into silence. There was weight to this silence.

“You should sleep. It’s getting late,” The man broke the silence standing up.        

Dan knew things wouldn’t advance. Part of him knew it wasn’t smart for them to advance. Not tonight at least. Maybe he was gaining some clarity, but with clarity came the weight of his thoughts. This was something he had been running from for days.

“Don’t go,” Dan said without meaning to.                                        

“I shouldn’t stay. I’ll just be in the room across the hall if you need me though. We can work out what you want to do in the morning.”

“It’s too quiet to sleep,” Dan didn’t want to explain why he needed noise to even attempt to sleep.

He didn’t know how to explain how if given the time his brain would grow ravenous and begin to tear itself apart. It needed noise. It needed distraction. The man never asked. He moved to the projector, fiddled about with it for a long while before finally, it sputtered to life. He watched the wall at the foot of the bed turn into an at-home cinema.

“Stay, for a bit?” Dan appealed.

The man hesitated and nodded. Before he could return Dan asked him the direction of his bathroom. The man directed him to it without question. He should have asked questions. Dan had an itch for self-destruction.

***

Once Daniel James Howell was alone in the bathroom of a stranger he felt his brain pulsing loud as he slowly felt sober thoughts creeping into his head. He raided the man’s medicine cabinet and managed to find a half-used packet of sleeping pills. 

That would do it.

Dan took more than he should have, but not enough to cause any real damage. At least he didn’t think so. He wasn’t quite suicidal. Though if he was toeing the line was up for debate. He was sensible enough to know that he didn’t want to be found face down dead in a stranger’s bed. For one, he like the stranger too much to do that to him and for two, Dan had some dignity. He just needed something to cut himself from his mind, to haze the waters that drowned him while conscious.

He took four, maybe five sleeping pills in total then flushed the toilet and washed his hands in case the man was listening from the other room. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and headed back to the room with the stranger. He settled in under the covers, watching fluorescent pinks and blues paint the walls. He recognised the film the second he saw Ryan Gosling’s face.

“Drive?” Dan asked quietly, beginning to feel the world smudging around the edges.

“Yeah, I like the film it’s… visually stunning.”

“The soundtrack is amazing,” Dan tacked on.

The other man didn’t lay under the covers. He instead lay on top of them, propping his head against the headboard making it almost impossible for him to drift to sleep easily. Dan had crawled under the covers, resting his head on the man’s arm. His mind was almost silent, as close to silent as it had been in a long while. He felt warm and sedated.

He wasn’t sure when it happened but inevitably, sleep took him over.

***

**_Day 2 – January_ **

For Philip Michael Lester waking that morning came with a form of surprise. He had found himself in his spare bedroom with a stranger. The previous day took a moment to catch up with him. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and yet he had. The other man was still sleeping soundly.

In sleep, his face was young again, innocent. His hair was now tossed into curls. Phil held his hand close to his chest for fear the urge to touch the other man would be too strong. His neck ached from the awkward position he had fallen asleep in. Phil fished his phone from the pocket of his sweatpants and read the time. It was almost midday. Damn.

He had promised he would meet up with PJ at their normal haunt, the coffee place a few streets over. He was already late. Phil was never late for anything. He looked at the other man’s sleeping frame. The world could break in two and he would remain still. He was out cold.

Phil adjusted his position, lowering the man’s head from his shoulder back down to the pillow. His breathing remained deep and constant. Phil found a blue ballpoint pen and notebook from his bedside table, tangled up in the mix of cables still strewn about the room. He made a mental note to clean up the room whenever he next got the chance.

_I’m going out for a while. There is cereal or bread in the cupboard, feel free to take anything. There are spare towels in the bathroom cupboard if you’d like to have a shower. I washed your clothes, they are hanging up in the laundry. I shouldn’t be too long._

Phil ripped out the page and placed it on the pillow beside the man’s head hoping he would notice it there. He should be hurrying to leave but there was a cruel tugging that urged him to stay. Against his better judgment, he leaned over and placed a kiss between the other man’s brows, brushing a stray curl from his face.

“Please don’t leave,” Phil breathed out letting his words bounce around the room, knowing how hopeless he sounded, how stupid.

“I know you’re going through some stuff, but I think maybe I could help or at least I could try. You seem like a nice guy. Nice guys don’t deserve to be so sad. We could go to the movies, listen to Muse, hang out awkwardly in hallways together at parties. We could watch Buffy together, have you seen Buffy? I bet you would like it. We could do whatever makes you happy.”

He felt extremely stupid. He had known this guy for a night and yet he was pouring meaning into things that meant nothing. He was one late night in the stranger’s life. He had the feeling that was all he would ever be. He should just resign to the fact. Let it go.

“Last night, when I said maybe. I meant yes. If you stay. I’ll tell you yes-”

His phone began to ring, PJ’s number flashing on the screen. Phil ducked from the room quickly answering the phone, explaining to PJ he would be there to meet him as soon as he could. He pulled on his jacket. It smelled like the other man, it was a smell Phil wouldn’t learn to identify until later.

As he exited his flat a part of him knew when he came home the man wouldn’t be there.

He had been right.

***

Daniel James Howell awoke in the bed of a stranger, in a place so unfamiliar that once he finally shook the sleep from his brain a cold chill shot down his spine. He had no idea where he was. The other side of the bed was still made but there was a note placed strategically on the pillow. What had he done last night?

He lay looking at the ceiling for a moment scared to read the note. He felt nausea rise to the forefront of his consciousness and bile building in the back of his throat. His head pounded. He waited for the events of the previous night to come back to him but instead, he felt as though he was staring at a blank wall. Nothing about this place seemed familiar. Panic was a ravenous wolf ripping apart his chest cavity, a snake wriggling up his throat.

He rolled over and read the note. The scribbled blue ink left him no solace. Whoever it was would be back. Dan felt the immediate urge to run.  He then realised he wasn’t wearing his clothes. Considering they weren’t his they fit him well. His first thought was, at least he was wearing clothes. The second was a feeling of dread at whose clothes he was wearing. They smelled of sandalwood and coconut. The smell was a momentary comfort.

Had he gone home with someone? Who? Dodie had taken up the habit of trying to set him up with most of her friends but he had been to most of the girl’s flats once or twice in the past and none of them looked anything like this. If it had been a girl, why did they have clothes that fit him almost perfectly? An ex-boyfriend? Current boyfriend? Not a girl at all? How much trouble was he in?

He leapt from the bed, fighting a wave of nausea and an almost debilitating migraine. He needed to get out, to leave. He ran about the house trying to find his clothes. Once he found them he gathered them in his arms and ran for it. He hadn’t even thought to leave the other clothes behind. He couldn’t stand to be there any longer. He didn’t know when this infamous person would be back. He knew he wouldn't be able to face whoever it was in the yellowed light of morning.

Once he was outside he realised that it was far more than morning, the sun was high in the sky. He didn’t know how long he slept. He didn’t know where he was. He felt dread, guilt, and shame all bubbling up to the surface. He both wanted to go home, to his friends, to familiarity and to go anywhere but. He walked until he found a train station and road without rhyme nor reason.  

It was the beginning of the week to end all weeks. The mental breakdown to end all mental breakdowns.

***

**_Day 9 – January_ **

Philip Michael Lester’s hands were painted green, less like envy more like vomit. The room smelled of paint and nothing else. Phil could practically feel his brain cells melting. When they had turned PJ’s living room into a makeshift art studio neither boy had accounted for the lack of aeration. They were cutting cardboard and painting giant vegetables. PJ had some strange idea about vegan zombies.

Phil had only half been paying attention. Even Chris had magically become busy whenever the idea was brought up. It was probably a bad idea. In hindsight, Phil knew this but hoped there was some way that maybe he could fix it in post.

He hadn’t been the best co-director or filmmaker in the past few days. He was nursing a broken heart, for lack of a better term. He never told PJ about it, knowing how stupid he would sound if he said it aloud. PJ still seemed to have a sixth sense for it. PJ seemed to become fed up with the lack of conversation. He placed down his paintbrush.

“For fuck’s sake. What’s wrong? If I have to punch someone in the face for you I will. That’s what best friends are for. Just talk to me. Even if it’s a girl. I’ll punch her for you. I’m for equality. Talk to me.”

PJ sounded just as flustered as Phil felt. He didn’t have the mental capacity to try and explain that wasn’t how equality worked. Most things like that PJ said were just for shock factor. He was trying to capture Phil’s attention.

“It’s stupid,” Phil didn’t look up from his crudely painted cut out of what he supposed was meant to be broccoli.

“Not what I asked,” PJ pointed out callously.

“Okay, let’s play a game. I’ll guess what’s wrong and all you have to say is warmer or colder.”

Phil still wouldn’t look up at him. He felt stupid.

“Has something happened with your family?”

“Colder,” Phil reluctantly decided to play along.

“Alright. Girl trouble?” Phil held back an eye roll. The look on his face was telling enough so PJ jumped to the next question.

“Guy trouble?” Phil paused for a beat too long.

“Warmer,” PJ confirmed to himself.

“Was it Bertie from film school?” Phil pulled a face.

“Bertie from film school has a girlfriend.” PJ shrugged his shoulders.

“I’ve always wanted to punch the kid. A guy can dream.”

That coaxed a small grin to spread over Phil’s lips. PJ looked pleased.

“Does it have to do with you ditching Chris and me the other night?”

“Warmer,” His voice cracked at that.

Phil must have some telling look that he hadn’t yet worked out because PJ’s face softened as though he suddenly knew everything. They had been through several heartbreaks together. Phil just hadn’t anticipated something so small in the grand scheme of his life to trigger his tell for a broken heart.

PJ let out a long sigh and moved to sit next to his best friend. He patted a hand on his knee as if trying to be comforting. They didn’t often do comfort. He was trying.

“Why’s it stupid?” He asked after a moment.

“It was just a one-night thing at it wasn’t even- we didn’t even do anything,” PJ nodded sorting through all his filed away advice and seemed to find nothing that could help this situation.

“Did you really like this guy?”

“I hardly knew him.” PJ let out a groan.

“Not what I asked,” He clarified.

“I feel stupid if I say yes. I didn’t know him for that long but it felt like something, you know?”

Phil wasn’t one for love at first sight. That was for movies he wasn’t interested in watching. His intuition always told him the boy would leave and he left. PJ paused as though he was waiting for more, seeming to know Phil wanted to say more. He wrote screenplays for a living, he should be able to come up with the right words but nothing came when he wanted them to.

The man felt like the moon. That night his personality, it was so large and strong and tangible but it’s stupid to think the moon would still be there in the morning. If he was really like the moon, that also meant he would come back, didn’t it? What was the night without a moon? Even a new moon was only a momentary departure. If this man was the moon, there would be a night when he returned.

“I’m worried about him. He wasn’t in a good place. I don’t know what happened to him.” PJ took a while to reply, seeming to think through his words.

“If this guy matters, then he’ll come back. If not- fuck him. He wasn’t who you thought he was.”

Phil could almost settle on this, but first, there was something he needed to do before he could truly let this guy go.

***         

Dodie Clark was about to head out of her own comfortable apartment into the fray of Dan’s home. He had come home the night before, finally. It had slightly eased the heart palpitations she had been having after her friend had gone missing for the better part of a week after showing a plethora of worrying signs that had her mind racing and jumping to all kinds of conclusions, growing darker and darker as time spilled on from the time she had last seen him. Him being home didn’t quell her worries. He looked like a mess. So, she had tried her best that morning to look put together despite the spike in her anxiety. Only one of them could have a mental breakdown at a time.

She opened the door to head out when she collided with an unexpected visitor. It was a face she didn’t know. She took the face in for a moment. It was a boy, tall around Dan’s height. She shot him a look of confusion. He seemed to be expecting it, his mouth already hanging half open to fight off any protest she could muster.  

“Hi, I know you don’t know me but I was looking for someone,” Dodie’s brow rose in slight confusion.

“You’re going to have to be slightly more specific,” Dodie was sceptical with her reply.

“Right, right. Yeah.” The man was nervous, his hands were shoved into the pockets of his jacket and what a strange jacket it was, pinks and purples all mixed together.

“There was this guy. He was at the party a few nights ago.  He was… this tall,” The man illustrated a height just above his own with his hand.

“Brown hair, brown eyes.” Dodie full well knew who he was talking about. It puzzled her why a stranger was asking about Dan, more importantly why the stranger didn’t seem to even know his name.

“I know who you’re talking about,” She clarified as she listened to him try and define the exact colour of his eyes and depth of his dimples.

“I just wanted to know if you knew whether he got home safe.”

This question threw Dodie for a loop. She had been wracking her own brain where Dan could have been for all the days he had been missing. Could this man be a clue? Could he know? There was a look of genuine care behind the man’s eyes.

“Yeah, he got home safe.” She expected him to ask more, but he didn't.

He was nodding, taking a step back from her as if he had gotten everything from her he needed. She expected more. He didn’t need more.

“Okay, thank you.”

That was all he said before turning and leaving. Dodie Clark was impossibly confused.          


	11. The Art of Misdirection

**_Year 1 – February_ **

_One of many theories about the end of the world is a scientific phenomenon known as The Big Crunch. Imagine for a moment, The Big Bang in reverse. Thousands of stars, planets, solar systems folding in on one another. A universe collapsing and condensing back into nothingness like air being released from a balloon. Some scientists have gone as far as to say that time itself will go backwards._

_Everything that ever was and ever will be will cease to have ever been. Until another Big Bang like incident will occur and the universe will repeat. Everything that ever was or ever will be, would occur once more. Maybe this has already happened, once, twice, several more times._

_This isn’t the place nor the time for long and convoluted scientific theories. But it does allow for perspective. Set science aside and still even biblical text states such ideas. ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.’ This isn’t a foreign idea._

_Maybe we are getting slightly off track. Maybe Dan and Phil have met more than once for the first time and maybe this seems the stuff of pure fiction but worlds of both fact, logic and faith whichever the reader ascribes to, have proven that things like to repeat. Maybe fate was trying to get things right a second time around._

_Maybe things still needed a reinvention._

***

Philip Michael Lester had let fear win over sense. The night before and subsequent morning was still fresh in his mind. This may be because he hadn’t slept at all since the incident. He was stupid to pull away from the kiss, stupider still to leave when Dan asked him to. He should have stayed, should have said something. What this elusive _something_ was, he didn’t know.

He didn’t know if Dan had truly forgotten the night they had first met or was just pretending to have, either that or he didn’t want to bring it up at all. Dan had kissed him this time, so there had to be some intrigue. That was for sure. So why pull away?

Fear.

That was the prominent thought that echoed about in Phil’s mind. He wasn’t typically the type to wear his heart on his sleeve, not really. Dan was always far more animated than he was, far easier to read. Most of the time Phil wasn’t sure how to feel about things. He couldn’t be as visceral as Dan. They had different ways to cope with things. If Dan was happy he laughed like everything in the world was right. If he was frustrated he would curse, ball his hands into fists, go silent. He had no poker face. So why had Phil questioned if he was capable of deceit?

Again, the simple answer was fear. To live a life run by fear was not to live a life at all. Phil knew this. He made horror movies for a living. He revelled in fear, but that was a different kind of fear. For the most part, it was fabricated. It was all fantastical, from ravenous vampires to cannibalistic vegetables or gigantic titans. They were all fantastical and fabricated horrors. Cars didn’t come to life and go on a killing spree, even writing scripts that involved serial killers. He would stay up late watching crime shows on cable TV. There was still a distance from the horror. It felt like a one in a million chance.

Crowds scared him, heights scared him along with horses and squirrels. Phil Lester had a lot of odd fears but he had discovered a new fear, which was very hyper-specific and harder to quantify with statistics or logic. He had the fear that Dan, this stranger, half-stranger, almost friend would disappear.

Phil called Dan in the later hours of the morning, telling himself that just like his rare social phobias and fear of heights it was something he would have to face head on. He sat quietly counting the number of rings it took for Dan to pick up, hoping that would calm him.

“Hello?”

Phil was a linguistic major, without words. He forgot how words worked. It was as though his mind had suddenly decided to reboot, leaving him breathing slightly heavy, hands clasping at his phone, wracking his brain for some form of linguistic syntax.

“Hello?” He used Dan’s words like a parrot, shooting them back at him.

“Hi,” Dan didn’t know what to say either. This loosened a weight from Phil’s chest.

“Hey…” He heard Dan scoff on the other end of the line.

“I’m running out of ways to say hello,” He almost sounded like he was smiling.

“Bonjour,” Phil’s tone was lighter.

“Did you just call to play a game of hello?” Dan’s words were clipped, as if there was more to say but he didn’t yet wish to say them.  

“I called to say sorry, for leaving like I did-”

“I asked you to leave,” Dan pointed out. Right.

“Right. Yeah.”

“So, you’re sorry you did what I told you to do?”

Dan had his guard up. Phil could hear it in his voice. He could hear a gritting of teeth, a holding back of words, a holding back of emotions. Even when Dan said nothing he said everything. Maybe Phil could do with being more open.

“I don’t think we should have left it like we did. You surprised me.”

“I don’t want you to explain why you did what you did. I thought… our wires got crossed.”

Phil was just glad Dan hadn’t hung up on him, though he felt a panging in his chest knowing that Dan was making it abundantly clear how what happened last night, that morning, wouldn’t happen again. He didn’t need to say it. Phil knew. That was the thing. They were on the same wavelength, perfectly in sync. Dan just didn’t know what he was listening to.

“I liked hanging out with you,” Phil breathed out after the silence was near choking.

“So did I,” Dan seemed relieved that Phil was the first to say so.  

“How about we just- forget the last hour or so of the night. Just… be friends.”

What hurt Phil most was how much it sounded like Dan was content with just being friends, as if that’s all he really wanted in the first place. Had Phil truly gotten his wires crossed?

“Just friends?” Phil repeated for clarification, again lost for words, again resorting to stealing Dan’s.

“Just friends.”

“Just friends.” This was getting ridiculous.

“That’s what you want?” Phil finally shaped his own words.

“That’s what I want,” Dan assured.

Phil felt a strange kind of fractured. He was happy, partly because he feared that after he had pulled away he had ruined any chance they had of being anything. But he wanted so much more. If he could not land on the moon, would he be happy just to gaze at it from afar? No. He wouldn’t be happy. But would he rather have Dan than not have him at all? Of course.

“Alright,” Phil agreed.

“Just friends.”

***

**_Year 1 – March_ **

In the days and weeks that followed Dan felt a strange shifting occur. He didn’t know how to explain it, it was like the world tilted slightly on its axis. He hadn’t expected to see Phil at all after the night he was still desperately trying to scrub from his brain but Phil let the incident slip by without ever mentioning it. If he was ever uncomfortable around Dan he didn’t show it.

He asked Dan to come over to his flat after Dan had finished work.  The place that felt both foreign and familiar. He had sat, watching Phil and PJ stitch together their films or scribble down ideas for new ones. PJ had a portfolio the size of several bibles filled to the brim with storyboard sketches. Dan couldn’t help but admire his art.

At first, Dan had felt out of place with the two, they always seemed to have something to do, something to work on. Phil was scribbling down ideas, planning the perfect way to convey a characters’ emotions through how the film itself was shot. He even had to plan through things Dan had never previously thought about.

An example of this is when they were working on a slasher film. They were planning a chase scene and fight to occur between the main lead and the killer.  Apparently, people didn’t just make this up on the spot, everything had to be meticulously planned. There was a strange grace to the violence. It became less like a gruesomely realistic situation and more like a dance, planning out step by step what was going to occur. 

The three boys had cleared out the living room, moving the sofa, T.V. and coffee table against the wall to make room for movement. PJ had used several of his toys (collectables, as he preferred to call them) as markers for where they would set up the camera and had Dan and Phil block out the scene so he could work out where the ‘ideal shot’ would be.

He was a grown up playing _make believe_ and he loved it. Dan could understand the two boys’ passion for what they were doing because after all, even if it was work most of the time it didn’t feel like it. Still, he had the feeling Phil was also playing a different kind of make believe that he couldn’t figure out.

“Alright, so you guys start at mark one. Dan, remember block, block, jab, duck then run to mark two and stumble,” PJ directed as he sat behind one of his camera marker action figures.

Dan was still getting a hang of all the terminology, but the two boys were patient. They didn’t seem to mind having him there, which had been his first worry when Phil invited him over. He felt as though he would be intruding into their inner circle, felt as though Phil was only asking him to be polite but in the past few days even PJ had asked Dan if he was coming back the next night after his work.

It was beginning to become an assumption that Dan would be there for their late-night planning. He could never be there when the films were shot since most of that was done during the day but he still felt strangely devoted to their little projects. He was always eager to watch the films they had created with the other boys in Phil’s flat the last Friday of every month. It was a tradition. Dan had slipped into this new life so quickly and so comfortably it was almost unbelievable. Daniel James Howell didn’t get things easily. It wasn’t who he was.

In that moment, Dan was trying to remember his steps, how quickly he needed to get from one cue to the next, attempting not to actually punch Phil in the face. With his lack of grace, it proved harder than he had first anticipated. He was left in stitches when either Phil or himself stumbled. They had both ended up falling over edges of carpet or bumping into furniture.

At one stage Dan stepped a little too far to the left, almost trampling PJ. He quickly attempted to right his misstep and sent himself ploughing into Phil’s shoulder. Phil stumbled with the weight of him but kept them both upright, his hands finding their place, one at Dan’s hip the other on his shoulder to steady him. It was as though they two had been marked out, as though they belonged right there.

Dan reminded himself that thoughts like this weren’t exactly ‘friendly’. He had to shake whatever delusions had gripped him about himself and Phil. It wouldn’t happen. The sad thing about him and Phil was that it had made Dan realise something. He could no longer think of himself as straight without it feeling wrong. The label no longer fit. It was an old sweater, which once had been comfortable but now felt itchy, too small, covered in holes.

“Don’t quit your day jobs,” PJ called up at the two as he stood up and stretched.

This was a common sign that PJ was calling it a night. He scrubbed his eyes and began to collect up his marks. PJ was always the one breaking the tension between the two. Dan and Phil both pulled back from one another. Dan wasn’t sure who pulled back first but he felt the loss of Phil’s hands from his sides like the loss of a limb.

“Sorry about that,” Dan spoke trying to recover his thoughts and shift them back to ‘friendship’.

“No worries, sorry for actually punching your arm before.”

Dan shrugged it off and pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to inspect the previous injury. He had almost forgotten. A small circle of skin was turning a yellowish blue. Phil had already apologised profusely when it happened.

“No worries. Battle scars. I might actually look tough for once, impress all the guys at work with their toxic masculinity.” Phil smiled slightly at that.

“You can tell them you joined fight cl-” Dan clapped a hand over Phil’s mouth.

“First rule of Fight Club,” He smirked.

PJ had paused from gathering is things, looking as though he was holding back an eye roll as he watched the two.

“I could punch you both if you want, that way you guys look the part,” He tried to insert himself, as though he felt like a third wheel. It was strange. That was meant to be Dan’s job. He was the one who didn’t belong.

“We both know how that’d go,” Phil commented shooting a secret smile to his friend, breaking whatever tension had been growing between the three.

Dan didn’t understand the comment at the time. PJ had leapt forward and chased Phil about the house. The two of them played like young children or clumsy wolf pups, knocking into one another, laughing and tumbling over anything that stood in their wake.

Dan would later learn that Phil was referring to something knowing as ‘the incident with Bertie from film school’. Phil explained it to him as he offered to take Dan back to his apartment. The two boys sat side by side as Phil spun the tale. They were sitting very close, Dan’s left leg pressed against Phil’s right for the whole journey.

Bertie, from film school, was a pretty nice guy according to Phil. PJ would never truly talk about him, other than making a snide side comment. They were too similar, according to Phil. That’s why they butted heads constantly. All of this had culminated into ‘the incident’ during their first year at film school.

Bertie had made one snarky side comment too many about PJ’s work. You could almost insult PJ about anything and he would simply brush it off, but talking about his films, his art or anything he created was a sure-fire way to get him heated. PJ had taken a swing at him, missed, hit the wall behind him and broken two of his knuckles in the process. Phil thought it was for the best because Bertie stopped pushing his buttons and PJ had learnt that punching him wasn’t the best idea. Still, PJ would jump at any chance given to give it another go, but he needed a reason to do it and so far, Bertie had given him nothing.

Dan tried his best to pay attention to each twisting and turning of Phil’s tale but his mind kept returning to their knees, brushing against each other. This night wasn’t like the night Dan refused to think about. Phil walked Dan to his building but stayed outside.

For a while, they say nothing. It is harder to pretend that neither of the boys was pretending when there is no one else watching the act. It was harder to pretend when they were alone. Neither are good at acting. There are unsaid words digging like thorns in their sides. It didn’t hurt but it was uncomfortable. It was a quiet reminder that something was digging just under the skin.

“See you tomorrow?” Phil asked, knowing Dan couldn’t argue even if he wanted to.

“Yeah, course.”

It was then that Phil hugged him. Dan tried to think of this as friendly but there was something more to this. He lingered. Dan was sure he lingered. He was momentarily drowning in coconut and sandalwood.

Before Dan had time to let his thoughts spiral, Phil pulled away.

“See you then,” Dan breathed, his voice coming out in a whisper, as though this was a secret shared between the two of them.

“Miss you until then,” Phil countered.

Dan’s heart momentarily paused as if it too was holding its breath. When it beat again it was rain on a tin roof. It was loud in his ears and rapid without rhythm. How could such simple words wrap vice-like around his throat and shut his quick-witted tongue up? Right.  He didn’t know what to say. He ignored it. He played _Turn It Off_ from _The Book of Mormon_ on repeat in his head because it both distracted him and seemed to fit the mood perfectly.

He took his feelings and stored them somewhere he would no longer have to feel them. He packed them in a box, shoved them to the back of a closet, tucked behind things he never used. He didn’t want to look at them. He didn’t want to feel this way.

He took a step back, moving from the doorway to the lobby area. He had no words. No good words.

“Later, Lester.”

Dan waved lamely and shut the door behind him.

***

**_Year 1 – March to September_ **

In March, Dan finished Christine and kept writing letters to the stranger.

In April, the stranger left Dan several Buffy comics in the portable library for him along with a familiar blue inked letter. That month they talked a lot about nothing. Dan still had no idea who they were. The odd thing was that he never had the urge to ask and neither, apparently had the stranger. Part of him had an inkling of who it might be, but he didn’t allow himself to entertain these thoughts for more than a second at a time. In April, Phil had seen the stack of comics and smiled faintly, commenting about Dan’s good taste in literature. In April, Dan put a copy of Ready Player One for the stranger since they obviously both loved video games and weren’t averse to reading.

In May Phil told Dan his favourite novel was Ready Player One. Dan said he had good taste in literature.

In June, the blue inked stranger wrote something that made Dan pause. It made him start questioning.

_I know this is out of nowhere. But if you were keeping a secret from someone would you tell them?  Even if it might ruin your relationship?_

Dan hadn’t replied until July.

_Would they want to know?_

He then went three days without a morning message from the blue inked stranger. On the fourth, he got a reply.

_I don’t know._

In August Dan was beginning to feel run off his feet. He had returned to writing regular messages to the stranger in the mornings, going to work for most of the day and then working on different things with Phil and PJ at either boys’ flat. He had begun fiddling about with PJ’s keyboard, starting to shape background music they could use for their films.

At first, he had been self-conscious, unsure. Phil had guided him through it. He didn’t know a thing about music but he knew how to encourage the best work out of Dan. He knew how to help Dan find his spark. Phil Lester knew that the only person holding Dan back was himself. Dan thought Phil had too much faith in him. Phil knew Dan had too little in himself. Phil thought they could work on that together.

August was the month things finally started to settle. Dan felt at home in Phil’s apartment. He stopped feeling a tension between them. Their friendship had finally begun to settle. Dan was content with it, on some days he would even say he was happy with it. Having Phil Lester in his life in whatever way would always be better than not having him at all.

In September Dan called Phil to pick up Dodie from a club. It was that night that Phil and Dodie instantaneously became friends. It wasn’t as though they hadn’t got on before but there was a strange fondness that Dodie harboured towards Phil in the nights that followed. She was always asking Dan where he was going at night, his answer always the same, ‘to Phil’s’. Before that night, she had been sceptical but after that night she simply nodded, as though she encouraged it. She even stopped pushing him to go to parties or would add at the end of her party proposals, ‘you can bring Phil.’

September was the month of change.

_***_

**_Year 1 – September_ **

It was not PJ Liguori’s intent to become the third-party witness to Dan and Phil’s muddled relationship. Somehow, he had been dragged into the fray. He was beginning to feel like a permanent third wheel. It was after PJ had realised Phil’s true feelings for Dan that everything fell into place and he realised how blind he had been.

Dan was over at PJ’s apartment, using his keyboard to construct an ominous sounding tune for the final cut of their latest film. It was a slasher flick on the surface but PJ lived for flipping conventions.

There was a film technique known as a misdirection. It was more often associated with magic tricks. You get someone to fixate in one direction while glossing over what was really happening in another. It was a slight of hand in magic. A bad use of this in film, in PJ’s opinion, was the classic trope of music swelling, the camera holding a tight shot on the subject and letting the tension grow. The audience is led to suspect a true scare, only to have a friend of the main character or a bird pop out of nowhere and have the whole audience rolling their eyes.

Their slasher film intended to flip this convention on its head. Surprisingly it had been Dan’s idea. He had a lot of good ideas. It was one of the main reasons PJ let Phil keep him around. The whole film would be underscored by tension-filled music but just before the song could swell to a roaring crescendo it would fall completely silent, awakening a new kind of terror.

That was their misdirection. A long feeling of unsettled tension which after long enough would grow into a false sense of security. If nothing would happen when the music played the audience would be lulled into security. Only when it was silent would something truly horrible happen, until the last act of the film where they would ignore their own pre-set conventions and heads would roll whether the music was playing or not. It was a sensory overload, a flipping of conventions and best of all there was no need for meaningless jump-scares. It was a trope PJ would be glad to let burn.

Dan had best explained it to PJ by appealing to his artistic side. Using silence was like using negative space in art. With Phil and PJ’s script, Phil’s eye for story and unique film angles along with this new score the whole film seemed to leap to life. PJ might go as far as to say that it was their best work yet.

Along with all this, PJ had realised there was also a misdirection occurring between Dan and Phil, a utilising of negative space. PJ knew Phil was in love. He would have to be blind now to ignore it. Dan and Phil both presented themselves as friends but PJ couldn’t help but feel this was a misdirection on both parts.

There are a million ways to say, ‘I love you,’ without using those words and PJ was sure in that night alone Phil had used all of them when it came to Dan.

“Have you eaten yet?” Phil had asked as Dan arrived at the flat.

“How was work?” He had asked right after.

“Is there anything I can do?” He questioned when Dan had said it wasn’t going well.

“How the heck are you so good at piano?” He had asked as Dan began to play, knowing Dan was self-conscious about not being good enough.

Phil’s, ‘I hate you’ after Dan had teased him about something trivial came out in a soft-hearted pitch that sounded like an ‘I love you’.       

When it came to Dan, he was all about negative space. The space between Dan and Phil when they sat together was almost non-existent. Phil would sit on the sofa editing and Dan would pull himself up beside the other man, despite there being a whole sofa free. He would even grow tired and rest his head on Phil’s shoulder.

When it came to Dan and PJ, however, PJ considered that they had become friends but he was lucky to have Dan sit on the same sofa with him let alone beside him. He even watched him with his other friend, a mousy haired girl. He would only ever return the affection she gave him. If she hugged him, he would hug back but he was never the one to initiate it. He was always resting his head on Phil’s shoulder and lying down in his lap.

Their friendship felt like a misdirection and PJ Liguori hadn’t asked to be the only person to notice.


	12. Memories of Modern Van Gogh

**_Year 1 – October_ **

_October was the month of uncertainty and duality. England was known for its dreary weather but never had London been as gloomy as it had that October. Not once that month had the constant thick cloud that settled over the city lifted. For a whole month, there was no moon in the night sky and so black was the days that the sun had almost been proven obsolete._

_A three-legged cat had taken up the habit of sleeping on the terrace of an apartment flat with good heating and an undercover awning. He watched a small series of pale faces drift about the place behind barley shut curtains._

_This night there were only two figures inhabiting the apartment flat. One white-black, one white-brown. The room was filled with muffled and rushed conversation as though the two shapes had a secret so big they had to hide it from even the walls of the building. The cat heard, knew and understood. It was a pivotal moment._

_It was also time for him to enter the tale._

***

All the lights were off. The quiet pattering of rain tapped against the inside sill of the window. He had forgotten to shut the window. He needed the cold night air to clear his mind. He was sitting on the floor of his living room. There was plenty of spare seats on his empty sofa, plenty of room to lie in his bed and yet this was the place Daniel James Howell had chosen to sit.

This wasn’t depression. Dan knew depression. People often had the misconception that depression and sadness were one and the same. They weren’t. In the spirit of the month, Dan would describe depression as feeling like a hollowed-out pumpkin. He could carve his face into an array of emotions but at the end of the day, he would still be hollow. Depression felt as though he had forgotten something as simple as how to be a human.

This wasn’t that. Dan was sad. He was really fucking sad and frustrated.

He had come home from work, knocked on Dodie’s front door hoping she would answer. She hadn’t. Instead, a girl who Dan thought might be called Stacy or Susan stood in the doorway in nothing but a sweater. He averted his eyes and told her not to tell Dodie he had dropped by. While in the hallway he looked at the time on his phone and realised that Louise would also be putting the kids to sleep. He felt alone.

He found his key and stumbled into his flat throwing open the windows for fear of suffocation. He had sunk to his knees in the middle of the lounge room. He couldn’t find the energy to move. His mind was working in overdrive.

He had been working for fucking months trying to create a clear-cut case to prove his client, a bonafide child, hardly of legal age, wasn’t guilty. There was no way they had enough evidence to convict him but the jury had been fucking vicious. Dan hated people. People could be cruel. In the moment, he didn’t have the clarity of mind to also note that people could be kind. It didn’t feel like it at that point.

He had managed to reduce the conviction as much as humanly possible with a jury who had their heads surgically inserted up their own arses and were hell-bent on convicting somebody for a crime, even if it was the wrong person. It was wrong.

Dan was sitting on the floor, overthinking what more he could have done. He thought he had done everything but it wasn’t enough. The phone in his hand began to vibrate. Dan watched Phil’s name flickering on his screen, the only source of light in the room. It was so brilliantly bright it stung his eyes. It was only then he realised how close he was to crying. He took a deep breath and answered the phone.

“Hello?” Dan struggled to keep his voice even.

“Hey Dan, It’s Phil.”

Phil said this as though Dan hadn’t known who it would be from the moment he picked up his phone. He wasn’t sure if Phil didn’t understand the twenty-first-century invention of caller I.D. or if he just didn’t have anything else to say.

“I figured.”

“You’re late,” Dan could hear the tension growing in Phil’s voice. He was worried.

“I’m always late,” Dan tried to laugh it off.

“You’re late for you,” Phil didn’t ask what was happening, he didn’t need to, he just waited.

Dan found himself getting up off the floor, shutting the windows, attempting to breathe evenly.

“I will be there soon, okay? I just need to clean up a bit. It’s been a long day.”

On the other end of the line, Dan could hear Phil exhale. For a while, he said nothing, as though he was thinking through the perfect words to say, as though if he found some magic string of words things would fall into place and everything would be right in the world. Sometimes Dan worried that Phil took too much of his problems on his shoulders. Dan was capable of looking after himself but he would be lying if he said having Phil as a constant shoulder to lean on didn’t help.  

“Alright, take your time. We don’t have much planned for tonight anyway… Dan?”

“Yeah?”

“You know you’re my favourite person in the world, right?”

This was an odd habit the two had gathered in the past few months. Dan wasn’t sure who had said it first. It had been an off-handed compliment that felt as though it held so much weight and at the same time felt so casual. Dan was still hopelessly in love with Phil. He had thought that over time, with the blooming of their friendship his feelings that they could be something more would smother but he had been wrong. There was still that familiar aching in the pit of his stomach whenever he saw Phil.

He still didn’t know what to categorise Phil as. Calling Phil his best friend almost seemed like a betrayal, since many years before that position had been split between Dodie and Louise, while PJ had claimed Phil as his best friend. Maybe that was how the saying was born. It still didn’t altogether explain all the nuances of their relationship but it fit as a basic umbrella term. They were each other’s favourite people.

“Don’t let PJ hear you say that. He might put me on the hit list with Bertie,” Phil laughed on the other end of the line.

“Nah, he’s an alien. He doesn’t count.” Dan was actually smiling.

“You’re my favourite person too. I’ll be there soon.”                              

***

Phil’s apartment smelled like takeaway Chinese food and sounded like Dan’s favourite film. As he entered in the front door he couldn’t fight the feeling that for once, he was coming home. He felt all the hair on his arms prick up as if they too sensed the shift in mood. He couldn’t hear PJ or Phil discussing film ideas and when Dan got a good chance to look around he realised PJ wasn’t there at all. The flat was warm, radiating heat, a stark contrast to the biting chill that rose outside.

“Strange weather,” Phil commented, looking up from his spot on the sofa, hunched over a box of noodles.

Dan groaned audibly as he shrugged off his coat and stalked into the main room, picking up the other takeaway box set out for him. He sat down fitting himself to Phil’s side. The world was so warm then.

“Let’s not be the stereotypical British gits talking about the weather. Not today.”

Phil nodded and picked up a wonton from one of the share plates spread out on the coffee table. Dan didn’t ask where PJ was. He had the sneaking suspicion Phil had asked him to stay home and continue working on their film while Phil sorted out what was going on with Dan. Dan knew Phil too well. He wasn’t remotely sneaky.

“Try this,” Phil noted holding the wonton and chopstick up to Dan’s mouth.

Phil was also trying to get him to eat without it being obvious. The cheeky fucker. Dan rolled his eyes before letting them wander over to Phil’s. He took a bite, all the while keeping his eyes locked on the other boy’s eyes until his cheeks turned scarlet. Served him right.

“New recipe, apparently,” Phil recovered.

“You really fucking suck at small talk,” Dan noted but extended an olive branch by finishing the rest of the wanton.

“You’re upset,” Phil commented simply, stating it as a fact, rather than a question.

“You could say that.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Dan didn’t look at Phil. He instead looked at the TV in front of them. Phil really had put on his favourite film. Dan didn’t even remember telling Phil what it was but they had told each other so much in the past few months he was losing track of what they did and didn’t know about each other. Dan felt as though he knew everything there was to know about Phil but also felt as though it was a naïve statement to make. Phil was a lot less forward compared to Dan.  

Dan liked categories. Dan liked favourites. He liked knowing where he stood on issues. He liked making this known to the world. Phil hardly ever spoke up about issues of things like politics, spirituality or philosophy. At first, Dan had thought they were just topics he didn’t care about but he was beginning to learn that Phil had beliefs just as strong, if not stronger than his own. It was just not often that he would voice them. He ‘didn’t like confrontation’. Dan lived for confrontation.

“Not right now,” Dan uttered finally as he sunk further down into the sofa and subsequently further into Phil’s side. He began picking at his takeaway container.

“Alright,” Phil had agreed.

They sat there together for a while in almost silence, both pretending to watch the film. Phil was wearing his glasses. Dan didn’t know how to describe what that did to his heart.

“How was your day?” Dan asked after a while.

Phil looked over, a little smile toying at the edge of his lips.

“It was okay. On the way home from my lecture a lady on the train tried to sell me bath salts. It definitely wasn’t the luxury lush stuff I was expecting.”

At this, Dan scoffed almost coughing up a half-chewed mouthful of food.

“You’re bloody hopeless. Please tell me I’m not going to have the police knocking down our doors.”

“No, I told her I was fine. She seemed like a pretty nice lady really,” Phil sounded like he genuinely meant it.

“You attract the strangest people.” Phil was smirking sideways at Dan.

“Don’t forget, you’re one of the strangers I’ve attracted.”

Dan let out a weak groan and buried his face into Phil’s side. It was warm. Curling up to Phil felt like slipping under familiar covers after a long day. His body was a cocoon of warmth and familiarity.

“Don’t remind me,” He grumbled against his friend’s shoulder, his voice coming out muffled.

He didn’t remove himself from his space, huddled so close to Phil it should be suffocating. Before his apartment flat had felt like a prison, small and stuffy but now he only had inches of the sofa to claim as his own and he couldn’t be more comfortable. Dan felt Phil’s head lightly rest against his own, seeming to sense whatever had been bubbling under the surface was about to come rushing out.

Dan felt as though the part of him, whatever the fuck ‘he’ even was, was also part of Phil. If he had a soul it felt as though his and Phil’s were opposing jacket zippers, as though when they fell into the right position they could latch together and become one. He could feel his shoulders start to shake.

It was then, with Dan so close Phil realised that Daniel James Howell smelled of nutmeg and peach.

***

Dan didn’t need to say anything. Phil knew enough. Every day for the past month he had mumbled complaints about work, the extra case he had taken on. Today he hadn’t mentioned it at all. Phil wasn’t a genius but he knew enough about people to see when they were hurting and know that sometimes talking about your feelings wasn’t the quick and easy fix your parents promised you it would be as a child.

He instead sat with his friend, so close he heard Dan’s breath ragged against his ear as though the breath was his own. They would talk about it, just maybe not tonight. Tonight, they sat, saying nothing for a while until Phil began to worry.

“If you are going to keep coming over all the time I might actually have to learn how to cook. I feel bad always ordering takeout,” He just needed conversation.

“I think you and PJ keep the place in business… I can cook, you know,” Dan glanced up at him.

“You should teach me,” It was another offhanded comment but Dan seemed to perk up slightly.

Maybe he also knew he was spending too much time in his own head. It wasn’t good for him. Maybe that was why he leapt at the opportunity.

“Alright, come on then.”

Dan stood, stretched and offered Phil a hand. There was a moment of hesitation. He then took Dan’s extended hand. Dan didn’t let go when Phil thought he would. Once they were both standing Dan dragged them into Phil’s kitchen still his fingers interlocked with the other man’s. He felt something bloom in his chest he would liken to hope. Then Dan let his hand drop and it was gone as quickly as it had come. But he had lingered, hadn’t he?

Dan began to rummage around in Phil’s fridge and pantry. Phil wondered if this would be invasive had it been anyone else doing it. Phil had come to learn that he had little to no boundaries when it came to Dan.

There was a draw in the spare bedroom which only held Dan’s things. Phil had never snooped in Dan’s things, but he had a good idea what was in the draw. There was a toothbrush, Phil knew this because he often left it in the bathroom. He also had a spare set of clothes tucked away so on the odd days Dan wanted to come straight to Phil’s flat from work he could.

Phil wasn’t sure when he had told Dan he could leave things at his place, it just seemed like the way things should be. So, Dan rummaging about in his fridge also seemed natural. Phil felt, in a strange way that his home was, at least in part, also Dan’s.  

“We might be able to scrape together enough stuff to make brownies… If we’re innovative.”

The kitchen became a cacophony of clanking and clattering utensils. Dan didn’t know where anything was and honestly, Phil wasn’t much better. He had baking tins, apparently. He hadn’t realised. Maybe his mum had given them to him as a housewarming present several years ago. He couldn’t remember. Dan was slightly too scatter-brained to properly follow the recipe on his phone and so every now and again Phil would jump in.

“I want to stir,” Phil found himself piping up with almost childlike wonder as he stole the wooden spoon from Dan’s hand in an attempt to stir the mixture.

He felt like a child again. He remembered when he and his brother were younger, helping his mother cook sweets for some guests who always seemed to be coming over. He remembered him and his brother fighting over who got to lick the contents of the bowl once they were finished and not even once worrying about salmonella. It wasn’t a childhood worry.

His father would often be just in view of the kitchen window. He would set up an easel after coming home from work and spend all the light hours left in the day outside painting. It calmed him. Rain, hail or shine he would sit outside, prop up an umbrella if he needed and paint.  It was a memory long forgotten until that moment.

Now it was Dan and Phil, crammed in his slightly too small kitchen, Dan awkwardly holding the bowl while Phil made an attempt to stir, spilling a large portion of the mix onto the floor.

“You’re bloody hopeless Lester,” Dan had informed Phil but he had been laughing when he said it. Phil knew Dan still wasn’t happy, that whatever was bothering him would still be there when he had enough time to think about it but for now, he seemed happy.

Phil remembered only realising later how much his own father had hated working the soulless corporal job he had been during Phil’s younger years. He had been a child. He was blind to the adult world of tax worries and money. He did, however, remember seeing his father coming home from work, shoulders balled so tight it looked as though tennis balls lived under his skin where shoulder blades should be.

He remembered his father coming home and instantly stripping off his work clothes as though his suit jacket was a shackle and his tie was a noose. He would then emerge from his room in shorts and a loose-fitting shirt. He would go out to the yard and paint or draw for hours and when he came back inside Phil, Martyn and their mother would greet him with open arms and baked sweets and in those moments, he would again look truly happy. Phil didn’t think he was ever able to truly comprehend his father’s ways until this moment.

Phil looked at the flour on the floor, bit his lip and chuckled. As an adult, it was his job to do the cleaning up. He might as well make a mess. He shot Dan a sneaky grin and bent down collecting a handful of flour and raised a brow.

“Don’t you dare-” Dan spoke as though he had read Phil’s mind but it was too late.

Phil flung the flour at Dan and with that simple gesture, he had started a war. It began with handfuls of flour and sugar, flying through the air at one another and ended with the two of them slipping around in chocolaty sludge, coated in flour, eggs, sugar and a multitude of other ingredients and condiments Phil couldn’t name.

Phil was doubled over in stitches, clasping his stomach tightly as though his laughter would rip his body in two as he watched Dan lean against the benchtop for support as he too shook with laughter. Dan’s feet slowly began to slip on the gloopy residue covering the floor. Phil moved to Dan’s side and slid down beside him, pulling his knees to his chest and sighing.

It was then that Phil found Dan’s head buried in the crook of his neck. Phil’s first thought was, thank God, he didn’t have a neck thing and secondly, he wanted them to stay like this forever. Dan’s shoulders began to shake. At first, it sounded like laughing but this slowly began to shift into something more guttural and broken. He was crying.

Phil mumbled quiet words of reassurance, pushing back the other man’s hair from his face. He kept running his fingers through Dan’s hair. It seemed to soothe him.

“It’s okay. You’re okay,” Phil would mumble.

No one had ever given him a handbook about how to handle these situations. He had never been prepared for what to do. Just like doing taxes and managing student debt, this was something school had never prepared him for. He was doing his best.

“Fuck sorry,” He heard Dan gasp out after a moment as he tried to pull himself together.

“It’s okay. Nothing to say sorry for,” Dan looked embarrassed. Phil didn’t want him to be.

“Sometimes crying is a lot better than keeping everything bottled up,” Phil remembered his mother giving him this advice when he was younger.

He was lucky to have grown up with the support system he had. He hadn’t realised this until later, of course when he looked at most of his friends’ upbringings and their relationships with their family. Phil had never felt uncomfortable coming to his parents about anything. The last time he had cried in front of his mother was when he had come out to her.

It hadn’t been a conscious decision to come out. He had almost been too young to realise what he was doing. He remembered being nine, sitting on the floor of his brother’s room. They had been playing on an old Nintendo system Phil was sure had ended up in a box somewhere in his parent’s new home on the Isle of Man.

“Do you ever think boys are pretty the same way girls are pretty?” He had asked his older brother, who had paused the game and looked at him as if he had spirted a third head.

“No, because I’m not gay.”

Phil had simply bit his lip and nodded. He hadn’t altogether understood what the word meant. He had heard people use it now and again but it always seemed as if it was a bad thing to be, so he must have gotten the meaning wrong.

That night while, his mother was cooking dinner and Martyn, had friends over Phil had found himself standing in the kitchen watching his mother. His father was outside painting as he always was at that time of the day.

“Mum,” He had asked out of the blue, shaking her attention from the pot of boiling vegetables on the stove.

“Is being gay a bad thing?” At this, she seemed to freeze, then took a long moment to melt.

“No love, what would give you that idea?”

“Martyn said it like it was a bad thing.” He could tell his mother was making a mental note to have a conversation with him.

“He mustn’t know very much about it then. That’s the main reason people say nasty things about it because people don’t understand it.”

It was then that Phil had begun to cry. In retrospect, he wasn’t sure why. Maybe he was afraid of people saying nasty things about him since he had always strived to be loved or at least liked by everyone. It was a bad habit that had followed him even into adulthood despite his better judgment.

His mother had hugged him, smoothed down his hair, and told him everything was going to be okay. He felt even worse about crying over it since Martyn had said only babies cried over things and he wasn’t a baby.

“Will you still love me if I’m gay?” He had asked his mother, who looked shocked he had even asked such a question.

“I will always love you no matter what. If you are, that’s okay and if you’re not that’s okay too. You don’t have to decide now. You have all the time in the world to work out who you are but whoever that is, is someone I love.”

Phil couldn’t remember the rest of their conversation. He remembered his mother had gone outside afterwards to talk to his father, something she almost never did since he didn’t like being interrupted. They had talked for what seemed like hours and Phil had still been trying to work out if he had been in trouble.

The next morning his father had handed him a sketch of two hands holding one another. It wasn’t what his father normally drew. He would draw birds, still life portraits of the countryside, every now and again he would do portraits of people but never just hands and never did he give them to Phil. He had blinked down at it in confusion.

“Is that your hand and mums hand?” He had asked then paused and swapped the order around.

“Or is that one mum’s hand and that one yours?”

“It could be, it doesn’t matter. They are just hands. Either could be a boy’s hand or a girl’s hand.”

Phil had been utterly confused by his father’s gesture but had taken it anyway. It wasn’t until he had been packing his things to head off to university for the first time that he had paused, looking at the picture that he had framed in later years and realised what his father had meant in his own special way.

It could be a boy, it could be a girl. It didn’t matter.

That was the last time Phil Lester had really cried.

***

Phil was thinking of all this while he rubbed circles into Dan’s back, wishing that someone had been there for him to teach him the same things. That sometimes you needed to cry, that most of the time when the world was cruel it was from a place of little understanding and not of true malice. That’s what he liked to think at least. Dan had quietly begun telling Phil what had happened with the trial, and Phil couldn’t help but also feel his heart sink.

“You tried your best,” Phil supplied, fingers still laced in his friend’s hair.

“It doesn’t matter. An innocent person is still going to jail… fuck I hate my job,” Dan’s shoulders slumped.

“Maybe you should quit,” Phil said it like it was easy. Dan looked at him like he was mental. Dan was about to argue but Phil hushed him.

“Hear me out. You hate it. Whenever you talk about work you always say how much you hate it. You keep saying you’re going to quit. Just quit.”

“It’s not that easy. What would I do? I have to have a plan.”

“You could make movies with PJ and me. We do a few festivals every now and again to get some money but with you I know we will be on the up and up. I can feel something good is going to come. I also sometimes do tutoring at uni and that’s enough to pay the rent.”

Dan didn’t say anything for a long while. They both knew that Dan quitting his job would be a big shift, monumental.

“My flat is more expensive than yours,” He noted, though Phil could hear from his tone he was considering it.

“My rent is up come January. Your flat has two rooms… I mean- I’m not saying that’s something we have to do but it’s an option.” Dan’s eyes had swollen to a near-comical size.

“You would move in with me?”

Phil wasn’t even sure he had thought this through. He never seemed to think things through when it came to Dan. He was impulsive, always jumping in head first. Would Dan even want him to move in? Dan was at Phil’s place most nights anyway but maybe they were rushing things. That and the fact that they were just friends and nothing more. Phil couldn’t wrap his head around it.

“If you would want me too but we don’t have to decide tonight, do we? Let’s just…” Phil didn’t get the chance to finish his thought.

A loud clattering at his window terrace made all his words die in his throat. Dan was looking at him, eyes mirroring his own wary worry.

“Should we take a look?” Dan mumbled, scrubbing his face as though trying to rub away any trace of tears only making it worse.

“Yeah, okay… alright.”

The two boys were standing up, holding hands again without either really recognising it as they crept up to the area they had first heard the noise come from. Phil pulled back the curtain with hesitation feeling his heart leap into his chest from anticipated fear and then fall into his lap with a heartfelt thud as he saw a three-legged cat lying flat on his balcony.

How the hell had it gotten there?

What a strange night it was turning out to be.


	13. Where I End and You Begin

**_Year 1 – October to November_ **

_The rain knew London better than it knew most cities. The rain treated London like a taboo lover, leaving often and returning just as frequently. The rain didn’t know if it should stay or if it should go but that October the rain treated London like they were the only place left in the universe. The rain stayed with London for a whole month._

_The London occupants treated rain less like a lover and more like an inconvenient uncle at a birthday party. They didn’t often like the rain, but they knew it well. The rain acted like an eraser that October. All pathways turned to puddles._

_The mobile library and all the books within it were soaked down to their paper bones, their corpses unreadable. All the letters within the pages of these paper books too bled ink so freely until all the words were unreadable. It erased all the conversations that had happened before._

_The rain drove animals to strange places. Pidgins blinded by rain either flew down into the rafters of The Underground or flung themselves aimlessly through the sky, often colliding with oncoming headlights._

_It sent a three-legged cat who had many names, and no names onto the terrace of a warm apartment flat where it would find a new name._

_Come November the rain would leave and the city of London would be born anew._

***

It was the strangest sight of a night filled with abnormally odd occurrences. Phil was in the middle of the kitchen that looked more like the site of an explosion than a room in an urban apartment. The mess he and Dan had made earlier in the night still stood sticky and beginning to stink. The two had other issues like the three-legged cat curled in Phil’s arms. It was bone thin and shivering.

Dan was scrounging about for food for the creature while Phil was simply holding it. Strangely for a stray, it liked to be held. Once Dan found a can of tuna and an empty plastic takeaway container to place water in for the creature he took it from Phil and migrated to the living room. Phil had stayed behind.

Dan had somehow gotten the job of making the creature a makeshift bed out of blankets from the spare bedroom. It was the same bedroom that Dan had taken to sleeping in on the odd occasion. When Dan had a closer inspection of the creature he realised how matted its fur was. Its black hair was tied together with masses of mud and shrubbery.

At this Dan found himself internally groaning. He had never cared for cats. Dogs, he loved. They were always happy just to exist. They always greeted you even if you were a complete stranger. Cats, on the other hand, were antisocial creatures who often would only show affection when they wanted attention or food. Dan supposed he and cats were kindred spirits.

He left the cat in its makeshift bed and gathered a towel and a comb, apologising to both Phil for using his things on a cat that may or may not have mange and the cat for the pain he knew he was about to inflict. He dampened one side of the towel trying to turn clumps of dry dirt into mud that he may be able to comb out. He was making a mess. Fur, mud and twigs were scattered about the living room floor. Dan had thought the state of the kitchen was bad but the living room was now a disaster zone while the spare bedroom and the bathroom had been tossed and gutted. What chaos two creatures could cause. Dan and the cat.

To Dan’s surprise the creature only scratched him twice and though both times had been painful and he had cursed a flurry of slurs that he knew he could never get Phil to repeat, he had expected it to be worse. He would probably lash out too if someone was trying to soak him and pull out his hair. Dan wished he could tell the cat it was done with its best interest at heart but in the strangest way, Dan thought the thing knew. While Dan tried to be as gentle as possible, tugged out knot after knot, the cat sat with its head held high. It was a bone-thin creature, matted fur, missing limbs but still, it looked like a dignitary.

Dan was almost starting to admit that this cat, in particular, didn’t suck when it lashed out and scratched his hand. The sharp nail bit deep into skin and split the meaty flesh that joined his thumb and forefinger.

“Jesus fucking arse cat,” He hissed placing the wound between his lips, tasting metallic drips of blood fall like petals to his tongue.

With all this in mind, Dan had no time to think about everything else new and terrifying that tonight had brought. Could Dan just quit his job? Could Phil move in with him? What then? Would they even be able to keep their heads above water? What was going to happen to his client in jail? He didn’t want to think about that, not now, not ever. He somehow felt obliged to though.

Through all this thinking and over thinking the cat sat watching Dan attentively. It then took a step closer to him, nuzzling its head against the hand he hadn’t wounded. Dan scoffed, taking that gesture as an apology and scratched the creature behind its ear. He smiled as he heard it begin to purr.

***

Phil was busy cleaning the kitchen and making calls to vets and shelters for any missing pets in the area or asking for advice as to what they should do. The only downside to this is that at that hour of the night almost all places were shut. He didn’t know what to do and so he did what he always did when he had no clue what to do. He called his mother.

She had answered quickly, already busy enthusing about how good it was to hear from him, how long it had been from his last call. He leaned on the doorway which separated his kitchen and his living room, listening to his mother and watching Dan. Dan had sat down on the floor beside the creature. He had already stated several times since they had found the cat that he, in fact, didn’t like cats but Phil thought he might be exaggerating.

Now Dan was shyly extending his hand to the cat, scratching behind its ears when the creature seemed unperturbed by his presence. Phil felt a smile toying at the side of his lips watching Dan. He covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said softly to Dan,

“They like you.” Dan looked up in surprise his cheeks turning pale pink. At least this was a welcome distraction from the weight of the conversation in the previous hours.

“Only because I smell like brownie guts,” Dan countered.

Phil must have totally tuned out his mother because now her voice rang shrill in his ears,

“Are you listening to me? I asked if you were coming home for Christmas. Was that PJ? Tell him I say hello,” Phil internally groaned.

“Sorry, yes I was listening,” He clearly wasn’t.

“I was thinking about coming home for Christmas, PJ’s not here but I’ll tell him next time I see him. But that’s not why I called. There is a cat in my house.”

“Your building doesn’t allow pets, does it?” He is surprised how unsurprised his mother is by the fact a random cat has just stumbled into his flat.

“No, they don’t. That’s why it’s so weird.”                                                       

“If PJ isn’t there then who were you talking to?” His mother’s backpedal throws him for a loop.  

“Uh-” His stumble and discomfort were so obvious Dan looked up from the cat again and towards him.

“I was just talking to Dan… he’s over.” His mother took a while to place the name.

“Oh, your new friend?” Phil felt like a child again telling his mother about some new friend all the while being slightly nervous of her scrutiny.

“Yeah, that one.”

“Well tell him I say hello as well then.”

Phil audibly groaned, pulled the phone back from his ear and grumbled in a half-hearted manner,

“Mum says hello,” In Dan’s direction. He looked almost pleased at Phil’s clear discomfort.

“Tell your mum I say hi back,” Dan’s voice was filled with slightly sarcastic joy. Phil rolled his eyes.

“If you keep doing that you’ll bust a blood vessel in your eye,” Dan chipped in.

“You know what. I might have to revoke your title of favourite person in the world if you keep that up.”

Dan looked as though he was ready to shoot back another snide comment and though Phil was acting irritated, they both knew it was an act. He liked Dan being sarcastic. It was his default. Dan being sarcastic meant he was feeling better. Phil watched as the small and unfortunate looking creature bunted its head against Dan’s hand seeming displeased that he had stopped petting it.

“Dan says hi back, now can you help with the cat?”

His mother then decided to become helpful. She told him several numbers he could call come morning so they could work out if it was just a stray or if it was someone’s pet who had gone missing. Phil was leaning towards the former as the creature looked far too thin to be owned but then again, its fourth leg, the one that was missing all the foot and most of the leg seemed to have healed well. Maybe it was once a pet. He wasn’t sure.

She then asked Phil to ‘call again with the video thing so I can see it’. His mother wasn’t the best with technology and for the most part, understood next to nothing about working her phone so he obliged calling his mother again with a video chat.

He moved to sit down beside Dan, who thus far had made the cat look considerably more presentable then he had been when the two had first found it while also managing to make himself look more like a mess. Phil didn’t miss the dirt lodged beneath his nails, the deep red scratches on his arms and hand. His clothes, like Phil’s, were still covered in flour and chocolate from the baking incident. Phil’s eyes trailed to the comb in Dan’s hand.

“Sorry, I couldn’t find anything else to use,” Dan defended instantly.

Phil wasn’t even remotely mad. He wasn’t sure how much it would take to make him mad at Dan. He didn’t want to find out.

‘No worries, I never use it anyway.”

“Then how do you do the thing with the hair?” Dan demanded combing his fringe to the other side and attempting to flatten it as if this explained everything. To anyone else, it would be nonsense. Phil understood what he meant perfectly.

“I just use my fingers. I don't think I’ve combed my hair in months.” Still, Dan looked shocked.

“Bloody straight haired weirdo.” 

It was then Dan realised Phil was still on the phone with his mother and quickly shut up, looking like a child who had just been caught with their hand in a biscuit tin.

“Hello Mrs Lester,” He quickly recovered.

Phil’s mother was holding the phone far too close to her face, whether from poor eyesight or just lack of understanding Phil would never know. She did, however, laugh at Dan’s blunder.

“Hello Daniel love, Phil has told me so much about you.” It was Phil’s turn to be embarrassed.

“And call me Kathryn, that way I won’t feel so old.”

Dan did the awkward little laugh he only did when he was nervous. Phil hated the fact that he knew Dan’s micro-habits so well.

“Okay, right… how was your day?” Daniel James Howell hated small talk and Phil was flawed.

His mother was too happy to oblige talking on and on about little trivial things that had happened in her day. She told Dan about the conversation she had with a lady down the road about everything from the price of peaches to politics and Dan listened intently all the while scratching behind the cat’s ear.

It was at this point Phil realised his mother had probably asked to video call not to see the state of the cat they had found, or to prove that Phil wasn’t prank calling and that there was, in fact, a cat at all. No, she had called because she wanted to talk to Dan. Phil felt both bewildered and embarrassed.

“Alright,” Phil uttered eventually.

“It’s getting pretty late.”

Dan looked up at Phil confused, seeming to sense he was uncomfortable but not understanding why, while his mother interrupted.

“I just wanted to talk to you about Christmas love before we go,” Phil wasn’t sure if that’s what she wanted to talk about at all.

“Okay, yeah.” Phil had looked to Dan as he stood, making a beeline for his bedroom with his phone having a feeling he knew what was coming next.

“I’ll be out in a second,” Phil had added to Dan before entering his bedroom and shutting the door.

“What the heck was that?” Phil burst out looking at his mother’s blurry image on the phone screen.

“I wanted to get to know your new _friend._ He seems like he’s a very nice boy.”

His mother said _‘friend’_ like she was meant to say something else. There was a tender knowing to it that the word ‘friend’ never held.

“We aren’t dating,” Phil was whispering now, afraid Dan would hear.

“You know I would love and support you if you were.”

Phil wanted to shrink down and disappear. At the very least he wanted to become something so small no one would notice. He wanted to be an ant, scurrying about unseen and indistinguishable from all the other ants. He wanted out of this conversation.

“I know, but we aren’t so we don’t need to have this talk.”

“I just thought-” His mother paused for a moment.

“You’re getting older and living alone must get lonely from time to time. I don’t want to pressure you into anything-”

Phil thought that was the job of parents, to pressure you into things. Though he would admit that his parents were better than most. When he had stated his dream of making movies they had encouraged him to pursue it, to move out of home by himself and to London. It was more than what most people got.

“But it’s nice to have someone, sometimes. I wouldn't’ say it if I didn’t think you were the type of person to settle down but I know you are.”

The night had been so long and yet this conversation seemed to drag on for longer than Phil had wanted or intended. The conversation went in circles for a while before ending with Phil quietly admitting,

“I’m not lonely. I’m fine. I have my friends and my work and… Dan and I are maybe… maybe talking about moving in together.”

The statement hung in the air before his mother found the need for clarification.

“So you two are moving in together as friends?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever asked him if he feels like you two are just friends?”

A whole new can of worms was about to be opened and Phil didn’t even want to touch it.

“We’ve talked about it okay?” There must have been a strain to his voice because his mother stopped pushing.

“Alright. I’m sorry for pushing. I just want you to be happy.”

“I am happy.”

As soon as the words left his lips Phil knew that in one way or another they were true. The past few months, past year really had been a roller coaster. He knew there had been lows throughout the year but there had also been incredible highs and right now, despite the strange and shitty situation he and Dan had found themselves in, the optimist in him was trying to convince him that there would be more highs to come and maybe the lows wouldn’t be so low.

He was happy and he felt as though more of this happiness was right around the bend.

***

Dan didn’t know if he had said something wrong to cause Phil to retreat into his room for the better part of an hour but something told him he had. He had liked Phil’s mum. She cared about him. Dan could tell that and that meant that the two of them had at least one thing in common. Maybe he was just embarrassed, which was stupid.

Nevertheless, Phil came out of his bedroom, with a face of composure giving little away of what had taken him so long. Phil had sat down beside Dan, for a moment resting his head on Dan’s shoulder mirroring the slightly too affectionate gesture he had shown Phil earlier in the night before he pulled away.

“Okay, I’m on cat duty. Go have a shower before you start to smell like rotten eggs.”

“Don’t you mean before I smell like you?” Dan provoked, nudging Phil’s side. Phil, as always took it as Dan had intended, a teased jab to mask real affection.

“You would smell better than you normally do then, rat.”

Dan scoffed, his tongue in his cheek. He was already postulating his next come back when Phil surprised him.

“I actually like how you smell, by the way.”

It was so offhanded Dan didn’t know how to reply. For a moment he just sat, smiling like an idiot, looking down at the ground.

“Yeah. I like how you smell too… Weirdo.”

He then stood and made a beeline for the bathroom because honestly, what the fuck had that been? He shut the door and leaned against it, feeling his heart throbbing in his chest, in his ears in his bones. It wasn’t fair that one person could do all that to him.

He took his time in the shower, attempting to steady his heart and clean his body. He stared down at his feet numbly hearing the sounds of the shower match the sound of the rain outside. He watched as mud, blood and chocolate dripped from his body and down onto the tiled shower floor.

What had he gotten himself into?  

***

They ended up in the same bed and Dan hadn’t planned it. If he and Phil were ever to end up in the same bed Dan had assumed he would have planned it. It wasn’t for the reasons he would like, of course. Instead, it was for convenience. Dan didn’t want to go home to sleep. Phil didn’t want Dan to be alone. Yet the spare bedroom was stripped to its bones and the blankets were strewn at the foot of Phil’s bed as a place for the cat to sleep.

Phil wouldn’t let Dan sleep on the sofa, despite Dan proclaiming repeatedly he was fine with just sleeping on the sofa. Maybe Phil wanted Dan to sleep with him. Dan was projecting. Phil was just an insufferably nice person.

So here they were, lying together several inches apart. The space between them could have been the space between continence or the space between planets. Phil slept with the curtains open. Dan could see London sleeping. They weren’t in the part of London that stayed awake for most of the night, this place slept.

Dan could hear Phil’s breath sound loud in his ears. His breathing was shallow but not enough to be the breath of a sleeper. He had the feeling Phil might have been awake and overthinking things too. He was definitely projecting.

They were facing opposite directions. Phil was facing the door which led into the hallway and living area while Dan was facing the window. He felt as though either of them moving in the slightest would cause the world to shift irrevocably.

It was in the quiet that Dan had time to think. He thought about the trial, about the boy and his job. He thought about the cat asleep at the foot of the bed, snoring and purring in its sleep. He thought of quitting his job, Phil moving in with him. He tried to picture a future where this would pan out for the best but he didn’t have the capacity to invent such bright sides.

He could, however, tell you every worst-case scenario from himself and Phil living together, learning to hate each other and being stuck together to them not having enough money to keep the flat and ending up homeless on the street. They would have to take up a life of crime just to get enough money to survive. Maybe they would sell drugs or rob banks.

They would get caught eventually and they wouldn’t have enough money for a good lawyer. His colleagues would find out then, obviously and his reputation would also be in shreds. They would get convicted and somewhere along the way Phil would probably learn to hate him. They wouldn’t survive in prison. Dan wondered if the kid would survive in prison. 

“I can hear you thinking from here,” Phil spoke, his voice deeper than Dan had previously heard it, groggy with half sleep.

He had rolled over to face the back of Dan’s head. Dan hadn’t noticed. He was too busy thinking. The world hadn’t changed at all. He rolled over to face Phil. The gap closed slightly.

“Sorry. Old habits die hard I suppose.”

In the dim light, against pale blue walls and warm light London, Phil looks particularly pale. His hair in a black halo around his face, for once it is tousled and imperfect. Still, imperfection seemed perfect when he wore it. Dan needed to stop thinking.

Phil’s hand extended to break the space between them. He touched the space between Dan’s brows, where a deep furrow formed whenever he started his process of overthinking. Dan grumbled and leaned into the touch.

“I was thinking too,” Phil uttered, that seemed to surprise Dan.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Phil half laughed when he said it, looking down and removing his hand from Dan’s face. Dan felt the lack of him like a gaping hole.

“Do you ever think about how to dead stars we are just dinosaurs?”

Dan let out a surprised laugh. He was lying in bed thinking about the inevitability of death, about worse case scenarios and the end of all good things, and by that, he mostly meant the ending of whatever the fuck he and Phil were doing together at that moment. Phil had been thinking of stars and dinosaurs.

“What do you mean?” He wanted to get a glimpse into the strange mind of Phil Lester.

“The further you are away from something, the longer time is between them. If we sat on the stars that we could see from Earth and look back, then we would probably see dinosaurs. But the stars that we can see now, might have burnt out millions of years ago. So to dead stars, we are dinosaurs.”

This wasn’t what Phil had really been thinking about. He had been thinking about how to get Dan out of his own head and if Phil couldn’t stop Dan from thinking he would turn his thoughts to something kinder. Dan, as Phil had somehow discovered, liked to talk about stars. The memory of his first night on the roof with Dan, pointing out bears and squirrels seemed so long ago it felt like the memory itself must have been a distant star.

“Sometimes you’re strangely fucking brilliant,” Dan had replied. He was doing that thing again, listening to Phil like the words he spoke were not only novel but gospel. It was strange to have someone so intrinsically interested in what he was saying.

“I don’t understand how you come up with half the stuff you do. For your movies. I don’t know how one person can be so bloody amazing.”

Never in Phil Lester’s life had someone talked to him like Dan talked to him. He didn’t know how to take such flattery. He had the strange urge to reach out and touch the other man but knew they were already crisscrossing the border of friendship and uncharted waters.

“That’s me… Amazing Phil.” He opted for sarcasm as Dan always would. They were rubbing off on one another.

“Fuck, I take it back.” Dan smiled nudging the boy’s shoulder.

Dan looked up at the roof. Now his body was the in-between of Phil and London. To lay facing Phil might push things, but to lay looking away from him felt wrong.

“Do you have music?” Dan asked seeming to puzzle Phil.

He still nodded, rolling over to grab his phone and earbuds. He placed one in his ear and one in Dan’s. Sometimes when he couldn’t sleep he would attempt to listen to music, to blast it in his ears to near-deafening proportions, wanting to feel his brain melt from his head. Sometimes that would stop him thinking. Sometimes it wouldn’t. That was when he would start to pace, start to walk about the streets of London with little to no aim.

That wasn’t the person he was anymore. If he convinced himself of this, then maybe it would be true. Maybe he still had parts of that person, but he was working on it.

Phil was shuffling about his music collection with furrowed brows. Dan chuckled quietly and took the phone from him, looking through Phil’s music curiously. Dan stopped when he stumbled across a Radiohead album. Phil didn’t have any music past 2012 and Dan wondered if it was due to the rise of music streaming apps or just because Phil had found music past that year uninteresting. Dan still had so much to learn.

The earbuds were short in length so both boys’ positions were decided on for them. They both lay on their backs, side by side shoulders touching. They didn’t need to link ankles, but they did. The space between them was so minimal that if Dan were to look at Phil, he would only be able to see Phil in the now. There wasn’t enough space between them for time to bend.

The beat of the music throbbed in their ears like a heartbeat. It grounded Dan to that moment and that moment only. His mind quietened.

“Phil?” Dan spoke out into the air.

“I want you to move in with me.”

This was the end of the event horizon and the beginning of the plummet into the vast and black unknown of the black hole which was their future. Dan wished he could write a fairy-tale ending for what happened next but that was a different story to the one that happened.

The one that happened still had twists, turns and stomach retching drops. Dan wished he could say everything from that moment was a clear path skyward because then there would be a fairy-tale ending. He also wished he could say that what happened next was an epic fall from grace because at least then his life may have been consistent with the image of doom that kept painting itself on the inside of Dan’s eyelids whenever he shut them, but that was also not the case.

He had known none of this at the time, of course. At the time, he and Phil had been plummeting head first into the unknown together.

**End of Act 1**


	14. Nude

**Act 2**

_You, are my favourite. It doesn't sound like much. To be put before photos of blobfish and videos of kittens discovering cactuses, but I put you before hand-holding. I put you before kisses, before "I like you" turns into "I love you, before the moment I knew you loved me too. You are before everything in the long line of everything that brings me joy, you are first. You are water to my thirst. You, are my favourite._

_\- Shane Koyczane_

**_Year 2 – February_ **

_Change. The word in itself is a neutral term. When you make a change you never truly know if it will be for the better or the worse until it happens. Change is a wriggling creature, which often slips by unnoticed until it is too big to be ignored. Then it latches its hooks into you and stays._

_Change had begun far before Dan had decided to quit his job. It had happened before Phil decided to move in. It had happened before Dan and Phil had begun scribbling notes to one another. Change wasn’t just one moment. Change was a constant series of little events only noticed when they culminated._

_Phil had changed his mind, chosen to follow his dream and make movies in London. He had chosen to meet with PJ and Chris the night he had met Dan. He had chosen to stay with Dan that night and all nights after. All these subsequent actions had snowballed into the big change they were now in the midst of. There was one thing, however, that hadn’t changed. It had stayed as stagnant as a rock feet deep in dirt. That was the unspoken tinge of romantic longing covered in idiotic claims of friendship. Everyone, it seemed, but the two boys could see it but no one spoke on it. And so, with no new little motions to push change forwards, there was no change._

***

Daniel James Howell was covered in blood and playing dead. It was the second time this month that he had found himself a stand-in for a corpse and he was surprisingly okay with it. The congealed liquid covered his limbs and the smell of off corn syrup had permanently penetrated his nostrils. It was all he could smell.

He had gotten used to the smell several days earlier after learning that one of the quirks of moving in with Phil Lester meant having to keep a hefty supply of fake blood stored about his apartment, in the fridge, in the pantry, next to the bloody marshmallows. Phil didn’t seem to even notice this was strange. At least PJ kept his array of latex creations in his flat so Dan could still hold some form of normality in his home.

That was another thing Dan had never anticipated. The aesthetic of his apartment, previously entirely monochromatic had changed drastically within only the space of a month since Phil had moved in. Everything Phil owned was an onslaught to the senses. Dan had asked Phil to keep the most obnoxious things confined to his room but like the fake blood Dan was now covered in, the colour had seemed to bleed into the rest of the house.

Dan had plants to look after. Dan could barely look after himself and now he had to look after plants as well. Technically they were Phil’s but Phil forgot about looking after them just as often as he remembered. So somehow Dan had promoted himself to primary caregiver of plants. He had even gone against his better judgment and gotten Phil a few more of the bloody beasts for his birthday to replace the ones that had died in the move from Phil’s old flat to Dan’s. Phil had hugged him for it and Dan had to admit that with just that action alone the gift had been worth it.

Dan had also promoted himself to primary caregiver of the leech he and Phil had somehow ended up keeping. During the subsequent months after finding the three-legged cat on Phil’s apartment balcony, the two had gotten in touch with every pound, vet and person missing a cat of any description in the London area. Nothing.

This search had taken a month, all the while the little black leech had lived with Dan, consuming his food and taking up space like a parasite. Dan hated cats but somewhere along the way he had learned to tolerate this one. He had found himself drawing lines in the sand and watching the cat slowly but surely breaking them down.

At first, the cat had only been allowed in the living room, then it was allowed in his room if he didn’t go on the bed. Dan woke up with the cat buried deep against his spine. He let it happen and it was his own fault. He hadn’t named it, or let Phil give it a name because they would have to give it away. Another month had fallen away and the two had taken the cat to the vet, given it all the check-ups and needles it would need out of their own wallets and it was at that point Dan had to admit that in some way or another, he had ended up with a cat. Phil had taken up the job of Dan’s primary source of sanity so he supposed it might be a good trade-off.

Dan was looking at him now, trying to act dead. It was surprisingly harder than he had first thought. His eyes were locked on the barrel of Phil’s camera. He tried to act dull and glassy but Phil’s lips were upturned in approval, making things harder. He tried to focus on Sean, the Irish man who Dan had first met at Dodie’s party when he had stripped from the bear suit PJ and Phil had forced him into. This time he was there voluntarily, which was a nice change.

Sean was a good actor, a regular to PJ and Phil’s films. Dan wasn’t sure how they met. He knew the man’s hair cycled from green to brown and that his accent was clearly Irish but other than that they hadn’t talked enough for Dan to discern his true personality. Phil said he was nice but Phil thought everyone was nice. He was the constantly optimistic chaser of silver linings.

Dan was still playing dead. It was strange to have a job that was essentially a long-running game of make-believe. It wasn’t his key part in their filmmaking business. He mostly handled the score and sound effects, often chipping in with scripts and on the occasion filling in for last minute cancellations. He was currently filling in for Sarah. A girl Phil went to film school with who at one point (PJ had told him) fancied Phil.

She was spending most nights in the flat across the way from his own with Dodie. Dan hadn’t seen her keep someone around so long in over a year so he figured whatever flame the pretty blonde had for Phil was now extinguished. That still didn’t stop the aching in his chest when he let his mind get too far ahead of itself.

He shouldn’t feel jealous but he did.

“Dan,” Phil’s voice came light and laughing.

“We cut like a minute ago you can stop now.”

Dan blinked several times, shaking himself from his head and sitting up, hearing the uncomfortable squelching of fake blood-soaked clothes. Sean extended a hand, helping him up and chuckling.

“I thought you actually died for a second. Good job,” Sean beamed, his Irish accent dripping at the forefront of each word.

Dan was starting to get the impression that he really was a nice guy. He had an energy to him Dan had seen less and less of as he aged. It was a bouncing childlike wonder the kept a spring in the man’s step and a laugh always balancing on the tip of his tongue. Phil had this in small doses but this man was always radiating with shaky energy. It was different again to PJ’s energy. PJ buzzed from creativity, hands always shaky with ideas, aching to execute them. Sean or as Dan had sometimes heard the other men call him ‘Jack,’ seemed to be overwhelmed with the idea of life itself. He was so different to Dan but in a way he liked it.

Working in a law firm had chipped away at bits of Dan he hadn’t known he had lost until now. Everyone he worked with was unenthused, dreary, always looking for the next pay check. Parts of it had sunk so deep into Dan’s psyche he wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to feel the wonder these men seemed to feel by just waking up but he thought that even by just being around them, it might help him recover some of his lost self.

Dan was snapped from his head again as he felt the soft threads of a towel brushing blood from his face, clearing his vision slightly. When he could finally see without the world holding a tint of brownish red Dan realised he was looking at Phil. He must have grabbed one of their towels on the way out of the flat. Dan hadn’t noticed.

“Thanks,” Dan breathed taking the towel from Phil attempting to blotch some of the blood from his shirt.

“No worries. I owe you one for agreeing.” Dan smiled faintly.

“I forget who owes who one now. We are either going to have to get a scoreboard or forget about it.”

“Seriously though, I owe you. I’ll make dinner or something,” Dan screwed up his nose.

“It’s all good. There are only so many times I can handle you burning the stir-fry.”

“I get distracted,” Phil defended, which he did.

“I’ll make dessert then.”

Dan knew that Phil making dessert was just as much for Phil as it was for him but Dan would enjoy it anyway so he shrugged his shoulders and uttered,

“Okay sure but you also have to clean the bathroom tiles if this stuff stains.”

“Deal.”

***

Phil had stayed behind to pack up the makeshift set two streets down from the place he now called home. It was strange how instantly the place felt homey. There were things he missed, the most glaringly obvious was the lack of PJ. On first hearing Phil’s plan to move in with Dan, PJ had acted as though this had been an inevitability. They had arranged to have time together after film shoots or university lectures to make up for the time they would miss from no longer living in one another’s pockets. PJ was no longer jealous of Dan, knowing somehow that what Phil and Dan had wouldn’t be able to replace what PJ and Phil had. They were different kinds of love.

“It’s like how you think you’re full at a restaurant but then they bring out a dessert menu and you’re suddenly starving. Like you have a whole different stomach for dessert. That’s us.”

Phil had explained this to PJ late one afternoon and to Phil’s surprise, PJ seemed to get it. He wasn’t altogether sure who was dinner and who was dessert in the analogy but that didn’t matter. The point was that Phil had room for two.

PJ was currently attempting to fold their reflector back into its case, cursing all the while when it kept bending in uneven and misshapen circles.

“I can’t hang out today,” PJ spoke out of the blue, not raising his head.

Phil felt the latch on the tripod leg in his hand snap and fold in on itself almost sending Phil pitching forward. He corrected himself, snapping the others and collapsing the tripod down.

“Oh?” He asked trying not to sound as curious as he was.

“I just- I promised someone I’d meet up with them.” Phil’s interest was piqued.

“Someone?”   

“Remind me to cast you next time the role of ‘parrot’ is needed,” PJ chuckled avoiding the question.

“Is it someone I know?”

Since when did PJ meet with ‘someone’? Phil was his only close friend and Phil knew the others well enough that PJ should have just said, ‘oh I’m hanging out with Chris/Sean/ Sophie.’ But that’s not what he had done.

“Yeah, you know them.”

If Phil kept pushing then he would get an answer but he didn’t want to have to drag an answer from the man. He wanted PJ to want to tell him and so he nodded.

“Okay, have fun doing whatever.”

PJ exhaled knowing that the worst was over.

“Thanks, I’m doing something for us you know. I’ll tell you about it later if all goes to plan.”

It wasn’t often in Phil’s or PJ’s life that things went to plan and nothing about PJ’s answer quelled his curiosity but Phil let it slide. Sometimes friendship was about knowing what to say while others it was about knowing when to shut up. He chose the latter and hoped he had made the right decision.

***

There were things Dan missed about living by himself. The number one thing was the simple ability to not have to worry constantly about how he looked and how he acted. After a month of living together, he and Phil still weren’t completely ‘comfortable’ with one another.

Dan had momentarily given up his long-standing habit of walking about the house comfortably in nothing but boxers and exposed skin. There was something freeing about it. He also couldn’t often be bothered to get dressed after attempting to balance his hectic work, household to-dos, friendships and free time so whenever he got enough time to himself there was something comfortable and easy about the vulnerability of nothing.

Dan was currently washing the blood from his hair while the unnamed cat stood at the shower door watching him with half-hearted curiosity. It was a strange cat for the fact it hated to be left alone. It would follow at Dan’s heels often latching onto him even more than Phil.

Dan had thought this was strange. Phil had told him about how animals were good judges of character. Dan figured this cat must have been broken. No one would ever judge his character as more comfortable to be around than Phil Lester’s. Phil was always brimming with bubbly excitement and wonder. He was the sun reincarnated. He was warm and welcoming. Dan was more like the moon. He was distant, cold, spacy. Who would pick him over Phil?

The cat was definitely broken.

Once his body was scrubbed from red back to pinkish white Dan climbed from the shower, wrapping a towel around him with one hand and extending the other to the cat. The creature nuzzled into Dan’s touch before realising he was wet and quickly batted away Dan’s hand adding another small scratch to the growing collection.

“Little bastard,” Dan mumbled under his breath as he dried himself off and pulled on his underwear.

Phil wouldn’t be home for another few hours so Dan didn’t see the harm in walking around as he was for a little while longer. He moved to the living room retiring to the sofa with one of Phil’s Buffy comics.

Dan had realised Phil was the person writing the letters to him in the coffee shop before he let his mind accept it. Part of him thought he knew it all along. What had made him know his hunch was true was the pale blue ink that had scratched its way into his home. The familiar writing was scribbled on the grocery list hung on Dan’s (now their) fridge. It was on all the little sticky notes Phil would write to Dan when he had a morning lecture and would leave before Dan had time to wake up. These messages would vary but always held the same vague meaning.

_Hey, can you look at the audio for 10:20 – 10:40? Hope you have a good day. I should be back after lunch._

_Your cereal was hijacked by ninjas. I tried to stop them but they were too strong. Here some money for more (don’t be mad at me)._

_I made breakfast. It’s in the fridge for you. If it sucks I tried my best._

_The cereal ninjas have struck again. Maybe we should change the locks._

Dan would often find himself writing notes to Phil as well.

_I’m over at Dodie’s. If you hear any loud noises from there it’s just me bashing my head against the wall. If you do hear this then S.O.S._

_Your mum called. Call her back._

_If you come home and the locks have changed Phil Lester you know why._

Surely Phil too had placed two and two together. The two never spoke of it though. It only made Dan feel more hopeless. He had fallen in love with Phil Lester twice without knowing it and the world was such a backward and fucked up place for letting him do so.

Dodie had laid off trying to hook Dan up with every random stranger he met since Phil had moved in and stopped barging in without knocking so Dan at least counted this as a small victory.

In the present, Dan felt the creature of fur and spite leap from the floor and up onto the sofa. The cat made himself comfortable on Dan’s stomach, kneading at the exposed flesh with its paws causing Dan to let out a small groan of exasperation. He let it stay there and slowly but surely became engrossed in the comic book he had been reading.

***

When Phil opened the door to his and Dan’s flat he hadn’t expected to be surprised with his friend’s half-naked body sprawled out on the sofa. He hadn’t been prepared to see so much of his flesh, to see all the dips and dives of him which were normally covered in loose fitting clothes. Phil couldn’t have known he would come home to this. The still unnamed cat was sprawled out on his stomach. Phil hadn’t prepared himself for his eyes to trail where they did. He hadn’t expected Dan to look up at just the wrong moment.

Their eyes locked and their minds seemed to take a second to process what either had seen. Phil wondered if his body fits the other boy’s curves. He wondered how warm the other boy would be under his touch. He wondered if he would ever get the chance to find out. He was going to hell for what he was thinking.

“You’re home early,” Dan looked like he was playing it cool but Phil could see through this to the wide-eyed panic bubbling below the surface.

“PJ cancelled. So, it looks like you’re stuck with me.”

Dan attempted to sit up, but the cat who had grown comfortable on his stomach dug its claws in. He brushed the creature off, sitting up and using a sofa cushion to cover most of his body. The cat skittered over to Phil’s feet rubbing its face against his leg.

“Bastard cat,” Dan grumbled.

Phil was thankful he had the cat to look at so his eyes wouldn’t stray.

“He isn’t. He’s an angel.”

Dan scoffed rolling his eyes.

“If you mean like Angel in Buffy than maybe. A blood sucking-creature.”

Phil smiled brilliantly at that and looked up at Dan.

“That’s it. He’s Angel.” Dan’s lips shaped into a protest.

“It’s perfect. Come on.”

“We haven’t even talked about keeping him.”

It wasn’t fair that Phil was expected to have a serious conversation with Dan looking the way he did. Phil’s mind kept wondering. He kept his eyes on the cat feeling an aching burn swell at the pit of his stomach.

“I thought when we paid for his vet bills we were just agreeing to keep him.”

Phil risked glancing up at Dan. He noticed a mole on the lower part of his hip, a discolour tan fading into pale white in the places that he always kept covered. Phil looked away again.

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to keep him. I just said we never talked about it.”                           

“I just assumed…”

“Sometimes it’s nice to actually talk about things.”

Phil felt like he was missing something. He knew what conversation they were having but he couldn’t help but feel like there was another layer to what Dan was saying. Phil took a step back, leaning against the wall, feeling as though there was an unspoken conversation dancing on the tip of Dan’s tongue. Phil had to look at him.

“What do you want to talk about?”

This sounded like the beginning of a fight. Phil just wished he could work out what they were fighting about. Dan seemed to reach this realisation at the same time as Phil. He watched Dan’s shoulders slump, his head shaking from one side to the next in a dismissive manner.

“Nothing.”

Nothing was a word that hoisted all the red flags Phil’s brain could muster. One word sent his mind into a tailspin. What had he done? Nothing was never nothing. Nothing was always something. He wished Dan would say what he meant instead of implying things he meant to say. Phil drummed his hand on the wall, tapping nervously. It was Dan’s habit on Phil’s fingers.

“I thought maybe we could go out today. If you wanted to since we are both free.”

Phil felt like he was putting a Band-Aid on a bullet hole but it was the best he could do if Dan wasn’t going to tell him where he was bleeding.

“Yeah. Okay.” Phil didn’t expect him to agree so easily. He didn't seem mad either which only caused Phil’s confusion to grow.

“Alright,” He needed to say something to break the growing tension.

He looked to the bathroom, to his bedroom, then back to Dan. Did he risk it?

Deep breath. Move forward.

Phil sat beside Dan on the sofa, closer than he needed to. So close their shoulders brushed. Definitely not five feet apart.

“It’ll be fun. I have an idea where we can go.” Phil nudged Dan’s shoulder. Dan nudged him back. Phil felt some of the tension knocked from his body at the touch.

“Care to share?”

“No way, It’s a surprise. I’ll just get changed. I’m all sweaty from holding the camera up all afternoon.” Dan’s lips curled up into a half smile.

“Do you even lift bro?” It was a joke but ‘bro’ hurt more than it should.

“Oh yeah,” Phil faked flexing an arm before sending them both into a fit of laughter.

Phil’s face momentarily burrowed into Dan’s shoulder. His skin was still warm. It seemed to stick to Phil. He realised they might be flirting and pulled away in confusion. Friends. Dan said he wanted to be friends. Hadn’t he? He had. He kissed Phil then said he wanted to be friends. Daniel James Howell never failed to confuse him.

“Anyway,” Phil was on his feet by the time he had the chance to say it.

“I better… get to it.” Dan’s gaze dropped to his hands. Was this what Dan meant by assuming things? If Phil had gotten it wrong why hadn’t Dan said anything? Why wasn’t he saying anything?   

Phil stood, moving from Dan’s side and darting into his bedroom to gather his clothes then ducked into the bathroom. The cat had followed Dan, which Phil was quietly thankful for since he wasn’t sure he wanted it watching him when he did what would inevitably happen next.

At first, Phil tried a cold shower. It was a desperate attempt to extinguish the heat rising in his body. He stood there shivering, trying to think of dead puppies and the shirtless window washer, out of shape and pushing his late forties Phil had found staring back at him through the bathroom window several days before. He tried to think of anything but Dan near naked. He stood there under the spray of the ice-cold water until his bones were frozen to muscle. Even then it didn’t work.  

He gave up, letting the water run hot again. Phil moved his hand down his body trying to keep his moans muffled. He slowly rubbed his hand up and down his length. Phil let himself think about Dan. He thought about the dips and curves of the boy’s body almost wishing he had looked more so he could commit all the other boy to memory, so if he never saw Dan in the same way again he would still have that moment.

It wasn’t just his body that came to mind. It was his dimpled smile, his laughs and scoffs. It was his voice in the morning, it was the curls in his hair like the curves of his hips. It was the way he smelled and the way he felt when he pressed into Phil. It was the lightning of his touch and the grounding anchor of his eyes. It was every little inch of Dan.

While panting naked and shivering Phil had the revelation that this wasn’t ‘friendly’ behaviour nor would it ever be. He had assumed his heart was capable of just being friends with Dan. He needed to stop assuming.


	15. Black and Blue

**_Year 2 – February_ **

_PJ Liguori’s knuckles had been broken once before. He had never anticipated it to hurt more the second time. He had never felt someone at the receiving end of his swing. Imagine chewing kimchi. Transfer that feeling from your teeth to your knuckles. It was the same rough crunch with far more pain. He made sure to punch with his non-dominant hand. He needed the other for his drawing. Maybe his priorities were slightly skewed. PJ Liguori thought he was a good enough person but more than that he was a driven person._

_He wouldn’t say he was an ends justifies the means kind of person, but when the ends were all he ever wanted he felt his morality twisting. He was a good person. He would tell himself this while icing his blue-black knuckles. It would take him another few hours for him to believe his own words. He was a good person._

***

“People are staring.”

For Daniel James Howell, everything is obnoxiously loud. He hears the chatter of foreign voices, the metallic rustle and screech of the train moving and shifting from one track to the next. He can’t see Phil at first but he can feel him. Phil’s side pressed to his side feels different to any other side in the world. His warmth was a different kind to everyone else on earth. Dan wondered if he was the only person who felt this way about Phil.

“No, they aren’t,” Phil’s voice at Dan’s left ear heightened a fraction of a pitch. That was how Dan knew he was lying.

Dan drummed his fingers on his knee, a nervous habit. Was he nervous because people were staring or because Phil had kept the terms of whatever they were doing late that afternoon very loose? Phil wanted to ‘go out with Dan’, but in what way? Did Phil assume he knew, like Phil seemed to assume most other things?

“You’re lying. Is this really necessary? People are going to think we’re in some strange sex cult or something.”

Either Dan was speaking too loudly or being too curt because Phil gave him a sharp jab in the side.

“There are kids around,” Phil’s voice was closer to Dan’s ear, quieter.

“I couldn’t see that though, could I?”

Phil had wanted to keep whatever location he was taken Dan to a secret for as long as humanly possible, which had somehow resulted in Dan sitting with one of Phil’s beanies pulled down low and tight over his eyes. It smelled of Phil’s shampoo, the one that Dan had begun using once the other boy moved in. That wasn’t creepy, right? It was eco-friendly. It wasn’t liked they shared a toothbrush. Okay, besides that one time. Blue and black look the same in the dark.

“That’s the point.”

“At least tell me we are getting closer.”

“We’re almost there.”

***

The moment Dan enters the building he knows where he is. His ears are presented with an onslaught of sound. Machines bang, beep and sing while children scream. He smells popcorn, candy floss and sweat.

Phil nudges Dan, signalling it is okay for him to remove his make-shift blindfold. The first thing he sees is the glowing of neon signs hung over flashing arcade games and rushing bodies swarming around him. Phil’s taken him to an arcade. Of course, he had.

Several nights before Dan had been bragging about how he had spent most of his younger teenaged years mastering the art of _Dance, Dance Revolution._ He hadn’t been to an arcade since his first year in university. Somewhere along the way, he had forgotten to make time to have fun. Somewhere along the way, he had forgotten what ‘fun’ was.

He looked at Phil slack-jawed and wide-eyed. The other man was fiddling with his wallet, Dan knew that this was Phil’s subtle art of saying he would pay. Dan had argued with him on this front enough that he let the man win this once without even beginning the argument.

“You’re such a nerd,” Dan whispered but he’s smiling so broadly he thinks his face may split in two.

“I just wanted to see if you could live up to your own hype,” Phil shot back.

After paying the two were given a games card with enough pounds to last them that day and some. Phil’s hand was suddenly at Dan’s bicep, giving him a small tug in the direction he wished to head. Dan couldn’t help but follow looking like a long-limbed puppy, slightly lost but very excited.

“We’ve got to work our way up to DDR, of course. That’s like the boss level.” Dan was still smiling like an idiot.

“Of course,” He mumbled back.

Dan weaved through the crowd of screaming children in birthday hats, forty-year-old men who seemed to gravitate towards the retro games like pinball and Space Invaders as well as several couples in their mid-twenties. Dan didn’t know what subgroup he and Phil would fall under in the eyes of an outsider. For once he didn’t care.

Phil guides him to an air hockey table. It is a safe bet that both boys will be equally as terrible at the game but that’s what makes it fun. Phil was wearing his glasses. They kept slipping down to the bridge of his nose leaving him to flail blindly for the puck earning Dan several well-needed points. Dan is almost sure Phil forgot to put his contacts in as an excuse for if he lost.

Phil had made the bet that the loser would have to clean the winner’s bedroom for the rest of the month. Phil had lost, at first but somehow managed to turn it around in some backwards game he had called ‘all or nothing’. Dan called it bullshit but played anyway. Phil Lester was a hustler in a former life, that much Dan was sure of.

The hours seemed to melt away as the two bounced from one game to the next, the two boys dragging one another to places that caught their eye. Phil’s hand was always reaching for Dan’s bicep, his hip and the hem of his shirt dragging him off to whatever flashing object caught his eye. Once Phil grabbed Dan’s hand and Dan instantly felt drunk and dizzy with happiness.

He wasn’t thinking of five-year plans or even fussing over motion picture soundtracks. He was too busy looking at the way Phil’s white skin glowed red, blue, green under the flashing neon lights. His heart quivered in his chest.

They say the average crush lasts up to six months, anything longer than that and it is a little thing called love. Dan is so utterly in love he is crushed by it. Phil is dragging him by his hand, the rest of the world went into soft focus. Phil was laughing, the kind of laugh where his tongue pushed out slightly between his teeth. Dan was weak at the knees.

“Alright, boss battle. Show me what you’re made of.”

Phil had guided him to the knock-off DDR machine and nudged Dan enthusiastically. Dan tried to act slightly less enthused than he was before realising how stupid it was and let himself enjoy life as it came. He was used to stunting his emotions to look cooler than he really was. He had come to realise that nonchalance wasn’t always the answer. He wanted to feel things in blaring colour if just for a moment he wanted to attempt to view the world as Phil Lester did.

The boys took their places on the dance mats and selected one of the easier songs. At first, Dan took a while to loosen up, feeling too tall, too clumsy, too unsure. Muscle memory kicked in eventually and he felt himself loosen up managing to rock up a decent score, kick Phil’s arse and not twist his ankle. All in all, he did far better than he had expected.

Dan looked over to Phil. His fringe was plastered with sweat to his forehead while his glasses were slightly fogged. His jacket and messenger bag were strewn haphazardly over the back of the machine. Dan wanted to frame this moment.

“The grand master is back with a vengeance,” Dan took an overdramatic bow, always the humble winner.

“All or nothing,” Phil panted back with a lopsided smile.

“Fuck off Lester and let me have this one moment.”

Phil did. He laughed, placing a hand on the small of Dan’s back as the two moved to leave the arcade. They spent the tickets they had earned on a retro Tamagotchi and a Winnie the Pooh keychain.

“I used to love Winnie the Pooh as a kid. My parents even called me Bear when I was little.” Phil’s smirk made Dan realise what he had done.

“Forget I told you that.”

“Forget you told me what?” Phil asked as though playing along before he couldn’t help himself.

“Bear.”

“I’ll set the cereal ninjas on you if you keep that up.”

Phil’s hand disappeared from Dan’s back and returned as a teasing fist several inches from his face.

“Try me. I have the power of god and anime on my side.”

Dan couldn’t cringe any harder if he tried. He grabbed the back of Phil’s coat and pulled him along, out into the London streets. He settled his hand in the small of Phil’s back now, his hand sandwiched between Phil’s jacket and tee-shirt.  

“You’re embarrassing as hell, has anyone told you that?”

“No one as fit as you,” Phil mumbled so quietly Dan was sure he heard it wrong.

Dan didn’t know what to say. He just awkwardly coughed, brushed a stray curl from his face and focused on his feet. There was no way he heard that right. Phil’s body pressed back against Dan’s hand as if demanding his attention. Dan looked back up at him. He was surprised to find himself face to face with the barrel of a camera. It was the DSLR Phil kept tucked in his messenger bag for the rare occasions a moment demanded to be captured. Dan heard the lens clicking into focus and snap an image.

“What was that for?” Dan asked, eyes slowly drifting back down to his feet suddenly shy.

“The lighting was just really cool, that’s all.” Oh.

“Oh.”

“We should have dinner while we’re out,” Phil declared tucking his camera back into his bag.

“Yeah, alright. Good idea.”

***

The two men sat together, tucked into a corner booth at a small family-owned restaurant. It was the rain that had chased the two inside. Dan hadn’t had the foresight to bring an umbrella. Phil had assumed it wasn’t going to rain. They both sat close, shivering and slightly damp. Dan had ordered hot chocolate and soup. Phil couldn’t remember what he ordered. He stripped his jacket and slung it over Dan’s shoulders. Dan pulled the jacket close to his body and tugged Phil’s beanie down further on his head.

“When we make enough money, we should go on a holiday somewhere hot,” Dan breathed as a waitress placed his hot chocolate in front of him and a coffee in front of Phil.

“We could go to Jamaica… or Florida. My family goes there most years, you could tag along.”

Dan hummed in agreement as he cradled his mug in his shaking hands. Through the window Phil watched people run through the streets, heads tucked down avoiding the rain. The world outside was monochrome people in a monochrome city. Inside that small café, everything was warm, mahogany tables, dark bean coffee brew and of course Dan, his eyes a deep chocolate-coffee brown and dark hair curling more than usual. Dan was warmth. Dan is Jamaica and Florida. He is every hot and homey place on the planet.   

Like at home the two men ate in relative silence, letting themselves warm up. Phil noticed that they had gotten to the point where they didn’t always need to be talking. He could enjoy just sitting and being with the other man. It was nice.

Phil’s foot nudged Dan’s under the table. The boy didn’t look up but he did link their ankles. Phil swore he saw the flickering of a smile, half-masked by Dan’s hand. The rain pattered quietly against the glass window. Phil didn’t care what he and Dan were. That moment was perfect and Dan was there to share it with him. Dan’s head craned up looking to Phil, then to the window.

“I don’t think it will let up anytime soon,” He commented making Phil realise that Dan didn’t know what to say.

“Let’s not be the stereotypical British guys talking about the weather,” Dan’s words in Phil’s mouth.

Dan chuckled, blushed, paused. A crease formed on his brow. He was overthinking things. Phil just wanted a moment where they didn’t have to. He just wanted them to be.

“We’ll be soaked by the time we get to the train,” Phil gave in and talked about the weather so they wouldn’t have to talk about one another.

“Maybe we should go now, while the rains letting up a little.”

Their ankles fell apart. They both paid separately for their food. Dan gave Phil back his jacket. The moment was over without either acknowledging that it existed. If neither talked about the moment had it happened at all? Was it a trick of the light? A trick of Phil’s mind? He would write this moment into a million movie scripts if it meant he could recreate it but he felt like all the magic would be lost. Surely Dan felt it too.

***

The two men were running in the rain. It was mostly Dan’s idea. Surely, they would get less wet if they ran. Phil had been halfway through informing him about some scientific study that had proven running didn’t help at all when Dan had reached out, giving Phil’s sleeve a small tug. Phil had melted under his touch and broke out into a run. It was a slippery and treacherous kind of freedom.

Dan’s hand gripped for the hem of Phil’s jacket as the two continued to plummet forward, out of their sheltered restaurant and into the torrential downpour that flooded the late-night London streets. Dan was skidding and tripping over his own feet while Phil was reaching backwards, holding on to the other boy’s wrist, trying to make sure they stuck together in the sea of blank-faced commuters. They were the only ones running. There was something amazing about running.

“Puddle!” Phil would call back warnings for Dan as his view was mostly obscured.  

Dan’s feet pounded and skidded against the slippery surface. Phil’s grip grew vice-like, pulling him back onto his feet before he could hit the ground.

“Careful,” Phil’s voice held a quiet softness, his whole body dripping wet. Dan must have been smiling because Phil gave him an odd look back.

“What are you staring at?”

Instead of being able to muster a true response Dan leaned forward and brushed Phil’s wet hair from the rims of his glasses. Dan’s smile grew until he broke into a full-blown laugh.

“You’re bloody soaked.”

“Told you running wouldn’t help,” Phil’s response was ragged. He was out of breath.  

“You know Lester, sometimes it’s nice to be wrong without an ‘I told you so’ attached.”  

“You wouldn’t need an ‘I told you so’ if you listened.”

“Oh, go shag a cereal ninja,” Dan’s curt remark was met with a tight-lipped grin. Phil was trying not to smile and failing miserably.

With that, they stopped running. They stood on the pavement: wet, soaking, shivering, chuckling. The rain continued to fall on the two of them. The large drops of water framed their bodies like pale blue-white auras. Phil took off his jacket. It was denim and sopping wet. He used it as an umbrella over both his and Dan’s heads. They walked slowly then, sticking close together for the convenience of the shared shield as well as the comfort of the other’s body warmth.

“We’re going to fuck up the hardwood floor at home,” Dan noted as he matched his pace to Phil’s.

“Can’t be helped I suppose.”

For a moment, Dan just marvelled at the response, at how Phil could always be so intensely positive. He moved closer to the other boy, wanting to be impossibly closer. He was done with second-guessing what this meant.

Phil’s feet skidded to a stop causing Dan to pace several steps ahead before jerking to a stop, his brows drawing together. Phil was squinting into the distance a puzzled look crossing over his face. It took Dan a moment to realise what he was looking at.

From the sea of faces, two emerged as familiar. The first was one Dan had grown used to seeing almost every day. The other man’s black curls and green hoodie called more attention to him than Dan suspected he wanted and then there was another face. This one was a face Dan was used to seeing on the periphery of his life. He had spoken to the blond boy only a handful of times yet Dan knew his face. His stern set eyes and young face caused Dan to pause.

“Is that PJ?” Phil asked while Dan chimed in.

“Is that Bertie?”  

Dan and Phil both stood, frozen mid-step, looking one another over as if the other held any answer as to what they were seeing. It appeared that neither did. Both silently agreed that whatever they were seeing was something out of the ordinary and that was saying something.

Latex monsters, bear suits and three-legged cats were all typical occurrences for both the boys so saying something was out of the ordinary seemed to hold extra weight. For someone who didn’t understand how deep the hatred ran between Bertie and PJ Dan would liken seeing them together, alone and conversing like old friends to a Christian walking into a bar and seeing both God and the devil conversing over a pint. It didn’t happen. Not even in theory did anyone ever entertain the idea of it happening. Yet here it was.

“Since when do they get on?” Dan whispered his head tilting over to indicate the other two. Phil was just shaking his head.

“I don’t know. We should get home, you’re soaking.”

Dan knew enough about deflecting to know exactly what the other man was doing.

“But what about...?”

Phil’s jaw is set. He’s hurt, Dan realises. His best friend has been keeping secrets and Phil Lester was too trusting. That was not an issue Dan shared. He didn’t trust anyone, not even himself. Though he might admit to trusting Phil Lester more than the rest of the population. Phil wouldn’t keep secrets from Dan. He didn't think the man was capable of it.

Dan nudged Phil: once, twice, thrice then grabbed his hand. Phil was touchy or at least, he was touchy when it came to Dan so he tried to reciprocate, hoping this wouldn’t cross the invisible line in the sand between the two of them.

“Race you home,” Dan dropped Phil’s hand and darted forward, throwing himself into the crowd letting himself be wild, impulsive, unapologetic.

“What about the train?” Phil yelled back his foot-falls sounding loudly at Dan’s heels.

“Screw the train, run with me.”

Dan felt a tugging on the back of his tee-shirt. A little laugh shook his frame as he batted Phil away from him, ducking and weaving from the other man in the rain, skidding, falling, crashing, getting back up again and running. His skin was black and blue and beautiful.

***

“I thought you took your set of keys.”

“I thought you took yours.”

Dan and Phil are shivering and soaked to the bone standing in the hallway of their apartment complex. This was where they met. Phil couldn’t help but marvel at how things had gone so full circle.

Phil was rummaging about in his pockets for the keys while Dan was kneeling beside the door talking to the cat who was desperately scratching on the shut door.

“Give us a second bud,” He called through the door. The cat began meowing frantically.

“We should probably name him,” Dan added to Phil as Phil removed the contents of his messenger bag and attempted to find the key.

“I still like Angel,” Phil weighed in.

“That’s because you’re obsessed with anything Buffy related.”

“I just feel like he should have an ‘A’ name.”

Dan eventually gave up trying to squat near the door and sat against it, sticking a finger under the door. The cat instantly calmed.

“What type of A names are there for a cat? Aaron? Adam? They aren’t cat na-” Dan cut himself off a wicked grin spreading across his face. Oh no.

“He has a name,” Dan spoke in a finite manner.

Phil finally found his keys tucked in the side zipper of his messenger bag, nuzzled between used gum wrappers and coffee receipts. He held up the key for Dan, who moved to stand.

“Ace,” He beamed saying the name with a strong Northern accent. Phil didn’t think it was possible to sprain a muscle from cringing until that moment.

“No,” He grumbled letting them in, so cold and sick of walking around in sopping clothes that he stripped his shirt the moment the two were inside.

“Yes, it’s decided.” Phil let a small smile slip.

Dan had been too busy petting the cat to look at Phil until then and the instant he did his face went rosy. What the hell had Phil been thinking? He quickly held his wet shirt to his chest as an attempt to cover himself.

“I um- dibs first shower,” Phil breathed watching as Dan’s eyes look anywhere but at him.

“Oh- right, yeah… Sure.” Dan’s lips were blue. Phil felt like a jerk.

“Or we could-” Jesus, how the hell was he meant to finish that sentence?

“I’m fine. I’ll put the kettle on. Just don’t use all the hot water.” Dan saved him from having to finish. Still, he lingered.

“You know I’d never keep a secret from you right?” Dan spoke out of the blue causing Phil’s body to freeze.

Why the hell was Dan bringing that up?

“I just- I could tell you were hurt about PJ not telling you why he ditched on you and- look I know you were the person I was writing letters and shit to. I figured I should just say it out loud so we both know where the other stands because I don’t want me not saying something to you to come back around and bite us both in the arse.”

Phil felt like he was being tested. Despite being freezing he felt himself break out in a cold sweat.

“Thanks for telling me… I um- I knew it was you too. For a while… pretty much since we started.”

He had hoped it was Dan writing to him. He had shown Dan were to find him, where to come back to the night they first met, a touchstone. It had been that coffee shop. He had hoped the person he was writing to and the then mystery boy were one and the same. He felt like a fool to hope.

“Why didn’t you tell me you knew it was me?” Dan asked like he already knew the answer.

“I assumed you knew.” His answer didn’t surprise Dan.

“ _If you were keeping a secret from someone would you tell them?  Even if it might ruin your relationship_?” Phil’s words, Dan’s mouth. Phil half naked, Dan shivering. This wasn’t how Phil thought they would talk about it.

“What did you mean by that?”

Phil opened and shut his mouth several times but no words came out.

“Did you really think I would be that pissed at you for not telling me you were the one writing the notes?” What? Oh.

Phil could tell him now. He could ask if Dan remembered the night they first met, two years ago. He could ask about the hallway, about the running, the dancing and the kissing but to ask would be to ruin everything. If Dan didn’t remember Phil was a creep. If Dan did remember it was obvious he didn’t feel the same way Phil did. So, he said nothing.

“It was stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking…” Phil let his excuse hang in the air for a moment too long.

“Anyway, I’m going to have a shower.”

Dan didn’t push. He trusted Phil. If he trusted anyone in the world, he trusted Phil.

 


	16. A Sleepless Night

**_Year 2 – March to April_ **

_There is both more and less blood in the human body than you would expect. Punching someone was different from the movies. There wasn’t a sudden, spitting burst of blood when you punch someone in the jaw. Their mouth tended to ooze and drip like a leaky faucet. At first, it didn’t seem like there was much blood at all. It depended on where you hit. The nose bled the worst. Just a tap on the nose and it would gush._

_PJ would never realise the true scale of how much a person could bleed until he was trying to scrub the blood from his clothes. He tried to convince himself that what he was doing was okay. Part of him was convinced but most of him wasn’t. He felt like he was walking a tightrope. There was a fine line between himself staying safe and plummeting to his doom. He had already gone too far to turn back. He was in this now._

_Standing in the shower, washing the blood from his body he could almost convince himself he was dreaming, or that it was just fake blood, that he was playing make-believe. No one ever told him that to get to your dreams you might have to trudge through your nightmares. Not many people would pick the path he had. He tried to convince himself that it was because he was dedicated but the longer he thought about it the more he began to realise that maybe he was just arrogant. He had done this to himself._

_This would all come full circle in the end. PJ could feel it in his bones but the ball was already rolling. Whatever was going to happen would happen. He would just have to learn to keep his head above water and to ride the waves that came his way before they inevitably drowned him._

_***_

PJ showed up to the film set the week following Dan and Phil’s arcade escapade with a mouthful of excuses and a bandaged hand. Sean had been the one to push for answers.

“Did you get in a scrap or something?” At the time, he had been practising his cockney accent for a theatre audition he had later in the month. It would be a loss if he got the role but the three other boys had promised to be happy for him all the same. Today his hair was brown. It was more professional.

“Joined a self-defence class with Sophie. Apparently, knuckles are easy to re-break.”

“Hard-core.”

Phil’s eyes bore holes in the floor while Dan tried to evaluate the situation while setting up the lighting. This was normally Phil’s job but he was drifting. He had shut Dan out all that morning. It was something he had never experienced from Phil, never thought he was capable of.

“I have a textbook I borrowed from Sophie at home. I should give it to you so you can give it to her if you two are hanging out,” Phil mumbled. Dan was almost too surprised at Phil’s tactful jab to notice PJ tense.

“Oh, yeah sure.”  

They went back to setting up. There was no small talk, no casual conversation. It was an unsettling kind of strange. 

“Are you coming over tonight Peej to help us edit?” Dan extended an olive branch surprised that for once in his life he was playing the role of mediator. Sure, he had done it before in court but that felt like a lifetime ago and today he wasn’t getting paid for it.

“I can’t tonight but I need you to get the music finished. I want to get this into a festival showing and our schedule’s tight.” PJ was clenching his jaw, holding something back. Polishing the whole score in one night was a tough ask but Dan wasn’t about to argue. For once he chose the high road, simply standing down.

As he moved back to fiddle with the lights he felt Phil’s hand grab his wrist. It grounded him. Phil pulled Dan to one side.

“You alright to do all that? I can probably by you a little time if you want,” Dan shrugged it off.

“I can do it. I love tight deadlines. We both know I would have probably procrastinated until the night before anyway.”

***

If that had been the only time that month PJ asked Dan to hyperextend himself then it would have been nothing, but it hadn’t been. With each day came a new and more complex command of both himself and Phil. Dan kept insisting he could handle it. That night Dan was eating his words, no. His words were bubble gum. He was chewing them, gritting his teeth into them and regretting every moment he didn’t spit them out.

It was well into the night and he was hunched over the keyboard he had moved into an old walk-in wardrobe and makeshift recording studio. He wished he still had a spare room to keep them in but he had given up the extra space when he took Phil in. He didn’t regret Phil moving in for a second but he did miss the space. They were constantly dancing around Phil’s filming equipment, and Dan’s instruments, his soundboards, synthesisers, keyboard, piano and even an odd bongo drum, ukulele or guitar if he could get his hands on Dodie and her instruments. Their films were truly becoming a communal act. Dan liked it. But fuck, what he would do for more space.

Instead, he was stuck sitting cross-legged in a closet lined with padded foam walls that he and Phil had spent the better half of an evening sticking up. It took Phil less than a second to knock several foam squares from the walls every time he would check on Dan. He was slightly self-destructive when he became overly engrossed in a task. He would forget to eat, drink, and even move. Phil was always there at meal times to make him take a break, always popping in to ask if he wanted something to drink: tea, coffee, Ribena. Dan acted as though it was annoying but really, it was endearing.

He wasn’t used to being looked after.  Sure, Dodie would check on him and make sure he was alright or sit with him when he wasn’t but it always felt as though Dodie was looking out for him from a place of worry. She was always trying to keep him stable. Phil tried to make him happy and most times he did it in such a subtle manner it would almost go over Dan’s head, almost.

It was Phil’s quiet knocking and the light that suddenly spilled into the room with the opening of the door that shook Dan from his head. There was Phil, as if on cue. He leaned against the frame of the door cradling his coffee mug. His hair was a dishevelled mess. He was wearing his glasses. This late-night, sleep ridden Phil did things to Dan’s heart he couldn’t at first explain. If he were to pick a favourite Phil this one might be it.

“It’s getting late,” Phil complained his voice coming out ever so slightly slurred.

“You can go to sleep,” Dan assured going back to fiddling about with the keyboard.

No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t translate the sounds in his head into a coherent song. He just had to finish one more piece. He had to admit even he was getting tired.

Phil moved from the doorway and plonked himself down beside Dan. The cat raised his head and stood stretching before walking over and placing himself in Phil’s lap. Dan almost wished he could do the same. He was definitely overtired. Phil’s head moved to rest against Dan’s shoulder and his hands froze, hovering over the keys. The silence made Phil’s action seem even more deliberate.

“Come on, you can finish it in the morning.”

Phil must feel bad for him. That was the only possible reason for him acting the way he was. Phil was always touchy but never to this extent, in this context. His words were mumbled against the flesh of Dan’s neck causing a shiver to run down Dan’s spine. Phil must have felt it because he pulled back slightly, shifting his position into one more comfortable for the both of them.

“The neck thing?” Phil asked with a half-hearted chuckle.

 Dan couldn’t remember telling Phil about his ‘neck thing’. He couldn’t picture a context between the two of them where that would have been brought up. In the same moment as Dan had the thought, he felt the ghost of a memory dance across his mind. He felt lips which were oddly masculine, slightly chapped and scratchy against his neck. It was something he had never experienced first hand so he was unsure how his mind had concocted something that felt so vivid. Maybe he was sleeping sitting up.

“Yep. I just have to finish this one song then I’m done.”

“Yes, but you’ve been playing the same ten odd notes for the past hour. If you get a couple hours sleep it’ll come to you easier.”

Phil had a point but Dan had promised he would send PJ the audio of the completed score by the next morning, or this morning he supposed. The sun was already beginning to rise.

“I don’t have the time,”  

“I’ll message PJ, making him wait an extra hour or so won’t kill him.” Phil was always the voice of reason but Dan didn’t want to give in. He could finish it.

“Give me another half hour, if it’s not finished by then I’ll take a nap, deal?” Phil paused to consider before letting out a sigh of resignation.

“Fine.”

The silence transformed into the slow tapping and repeating of the same ten keys Dan had been playing for the last hour. He had grown used to creating music that fit the classic ‘horror’ vibe but this song needed to be different. This song wasn’t meant for a chase scene between man and monster or the spine-chilling swell of an obscure string instrument as the character suddenly made a pivotal revelation.

This song was for a moment of both love and sadness. Dan tried to think of the scene, tried to slip into the character’s skin. There was a couple, played by Sarah and another girl from the theatre program at Phil’s university, Dan couldn’t remember her name. He would call her Susan. It’s an inside joke between him and Phil. They were both terrible with names. At least they had both learned Sarah’s name. Otherwise, they might have had to call them Susan one and Susan two and that was getting a little extraneous. Over the runtime of the film, the couple had discovered that they were locked in their apartment building with a monster. If you asked Dan to describe the monster he would say it was complicated.

He had been there helping make the costume and he still didn’t know how to explain it. He had sat watching PJ sew black feathers onto a silken cloak, pricking his fingers constantly to the stage that they were so calloused they no longer bleed. He had sat down and played the role of a living manikin as Phil attempted to make a mask of PJ’s design sketches from wax, clay and liquid latex. Dan still couldn’t explain how to describe the monster. He was getting side-tracked.

The couple had split up several scenes before, after realising they may be the only ones left in the building, trapped with the indescribable horror.  This was the last scene before the third act. Tensions were high.  Cue the swelling of music, Sara’s character sees something out of the corner of her eye, assumes it’s the monster and plummets her makeshift weapon into the creature, but it’s not the creature. It’s Susan.

Then there is the scene that Dan can’t figure out. What does hurt, love and sorrow sound like when they are all bundled together. Susan’s dying, and visually it’s Dan’s favourite scene. It’s beautiful and brutal. It’s where Phil’s visual aesthetic really shines.

Susan’s hair is red, magically not the kind that comes from a bottle but instead the win of a unique genetic lottery. In the scene she’s all in white, bleeding out on the checkerboard linoleum floor. The fire exit sign above her head lit the whole scene a blushing vermillion. Sarah’s hands shake and her body is wracked with sobs. Whatever grudges Dan held towards her could be put aside when he said she was a bloody amazing actress. They kiss and Susan dies.

This kiss was one Dan had to downplay every time Dodie questioned about it. ‘Not that I care’, she would always add directly after. It was strange to see two people so in love and yet so ignorant of each other’s feelings. Dodie kept simplifying their relationship to ‘fooling around’. It wasn’t that Dan didn’t think sex or casual affection was possible without love. He had seen Dodie do it many times over but it wasn’t the same as what they were experiencing now. Sometimes Dan felt like a messenger pigeon carrying information between the two. He wished they would both hurry up and realise what was clear as day to everyone but them.

Dan was still playing the same ten notes over and over again. Maybe he should just start again. The problem was that Dan knew a song that would suit the mood, but it was something he wasn’t sure he wanted to share. He knew it off by heart- which was pitiful.

He was running low on sleep, ideas and time. So, his fingers made the choice for him. He began tapping away at the keys, finding the familiar quiet trills a comfort. Dan felt Phil’s head move from its spot on his shoulder as he listened to him play. Dan never considered himself to be ‘good’ at playing the piano. He just wasn’t horrible but Phil was looking at him as if he had pulled  something strange and magical from thin air. He hadn’t of course. He had written this song so long ago it felt like an old friend. He had written it one night, staring at scratchy blue ink while thinking of both the stranger and Phil, back before he had known the two were one and the same. He had simply called it Blue.

It wasn’t a long song, barely pushing two minutes but it was just long enough for the scene.  Phil looked at him like he had painted everything in The Louvre with his feet. He hadn’t. He had told Phil how he felt, using just the right string of notes tied together in a bow of false pretences with a card attached, written in a language Phil couldn’t read.

Dan wasn’t even sure if Phil would understand what the song meant if he told him who it was about but maybe he would understand in the same abstract way Dan could somehow understand all the nuances and emotions Phil put into his film simply through colour, every Dutch angle and swish tilt.  Dan could feel what Phil wanted him to feel without having the words to articulate how the other boy had done it.

Maybe that’s what was happening between them because when he stopped playing Phil had gone stone silent. His blue eyes were locked somewhere just behind Dan as if he couldn’t decide whether to look at him or look away from him. In Phil’s lap, the cat slept and purred.

Dan didn't know what to say. He let the silence hang in the air, the cat's purr the only noise which continued to break the silence.

"I like that one," Phil spoke at last.

It wasn't the first time that Phil had said he liked something Dan had written, on the contrary. He did it often. Dan hated to admit it but Phil's praise of his work was often what spurred him on in times where he didn't think he was good enough. Those times happened more often than Dan would like to admit but he was working on that. He and Phil were working on it together, so it seemed. This time, however, was different. There was something in Phil's voice that told Dan this song really was special. It almost made him want to save it for himself and Phil. He wanted them to keep something for themselves. It felt like filmmaking was beginning to meld with every bit of his life like glitter or sand, once it entered a place it never really left. On another night, maybe Dan would have let them keep this but the promise of sleep was too tempting.

Dan slumped back into Phil without truly meaning to. He was tired. His tired brain had little filters for the barriers that should exist between himself and Phil but then again Phil had been disregarding them all night so why should Dan think about them now? Phil was the one who had rejected him. Maybe that's why Dan liked the idea of boundaries, so he wouldn't get hurt again. It was too late. Phil Lester was glitter or sand in his heart. He had touched it, buried himself in all the cracks and crevices of Dan's aorta and capillary. No matter how hard Dan tried he couldn't shake every inch of Phil from him. Dan's face was buried in Phil's neck and both the older and younger boy silently thanked a God neither believed in that Phil Lester didn't have a 'neck thing'

"Alright, bedtime," Phil sounded as if he had sadly resigned to something which Dan couldn't work out.

Dan pried himself from Phil's body and stood extending a hand to Phil, who attempted to shoo the cat from his lap.

"Is it your night or mine?" Dan asked referring to the mental roster both boys had created for who had to sleep with the cat.

They tried to take it in turns, Dan having Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday while Phil had the others but the cat had a mind of its own and would often either dart from one room to the other in the dead of night or choose to only want to sleep with one of the boys even if it wasn't their allotted day.

"You can't blame him," Phil had tried to defend one night when despite it being Phil's day to sleep with Ace he kept sneaking into Dan's room.

"Cat's can't tell the days of the week."

Dan was sure this one could and was just trying to piss him off. Never the less he would always grumble and make room for the creature when it appeared in his doorway. He had to get used to sleeping with the door open but now that he had it was almost comforting. With Phil's room, right across the hall and his door also wide open Dan could hear him breathe. It helped on nights where Dan's mind was too loud to let him sleep. Phil's breath acted as a calming presence, though Dan didn't think he could ever admit that out loud.

“I’ll take him,” Phil decided though both boys knew it was Dan’s night, he didn’t argue.

***

With the sun peeking through the blinds of Dan’s bedroom window he settled down for sleep but before it could come he felt a weight crash onto his chest, heavy and warm. The cat, of course.

“My night then,” Dan mumbled aloud, to the cat, to himself, to the air.

The creature wasn’t content. He jumped from Dan’s chest and darted off out of the room and across the hall into Phil’s. Dan sat up with curious annoyance, watching the cat do the same to Phil. Phil fumbled around blindly, attempting to find his glasses, Dan found a sleepy, lopsided smile tugging at the corner of his lip.

Just as Phil found his glasses the cat sprinted back into Dan’s room. This back and forth was something new and Dan wasn’t in the mood. He made a mental note to never have kids if they were twice as bad. He liked sleep far too much for children. The worst part of all of it was that the cat was a narcissistic little bugger. He would run into Dan’s room, momentarily settle and then dart off again into Phil’s room.

Dan heard the creature collide with Phil’s frame, curled into a tight ball under the covers.

“Bloody hell Ace,” Phil always sounded particularly Northern when tired but with those three words strung together in a half-hearted sentence Dan couldn’t help but chuckle.

Phil’s head raised from under the covers his eyes meeting Dan’s from across the hall. His chest rose and fell with a deep and frustrated sigh.

“Maybe he’s hungry,” Dan supplied attempting to help.

“I fed him an hour ago.” Right.

“Does he have water?”

“Yep, I checked.” It was Dan’s turn to let out a long huff just as Ace sprinted back into his room.

“Maybe he wants to sleep with both of us tonight.”

When Phil first offered this cause, Dan had scoffed, thinking it was ridiculous but with the cat continually darting from one room to the next for the better part of half an hour, he was willing to try anything. He told himself it wasn’t a big deal. He gathered his pillow and duvet and trudged across the hallway. Phil didn’t even question his actions, he just scooted over so there was enough room for the two of them without either having to touch. The room itself was far brighter than Dan’s. Phil’s habit of sleeping with the curtains open seemed to even extend into the daylight hours. London was bleak grey yet the faint light of morning was enough to illuminate the room. He buried himself deeper into a cocoon of cloth, still trying to keep his distance from Phil. The cat had other plans.

Instead of settling between the men, the creature wedged itself into Dan’s back, pushing the two closer in its attempt to gain more room of its own. They had to touch. Phil slept half curled into himself, his knees half resting on Dan’s upper thigh. His face was mostly obscured by a mass of blankets. Dan let himself look at the other man.

In the prelude to sleep, they face one another. Phil’s breath was inches from Dan’s face. He still smelt like coffee. Dan had brushed his teeth before retiring so his own breath smelled of mint. Dan shut his eyes, unable to focus with Phil’s face mere inches from his own. This wasn’t the first time they had slept together but every time they did Dan would make a mental note not to make it a habit. Such proximity only strengthened the ache which grew in the pit of his stomach at the idea of what they almost were. He needed to sleep.

He felt a finger grace over the space between his brows. It was the place where wrinkles sprung when he was deep in thought. He opened his eyes again seeing that Phil’s eyes too where open and looking him over in a curious manner.

“Can you hear me thinking again?” Dan questioned, already knowing the answer.

“I was just thinking that it would be a shame if you gave yourself wrinkles.” Dan let out a noncommittal grumble.

“Speak for yourself old man.” Phil shoved his shoulder lightly before leaning over to grab his phone and earbuds. He reached over to place one in Dan’s ear, taking the other for himself. They were used to each other. Phil knew Dan slept best with noise.

“Shut up and sleep Howell, it’s been a long day.”

Phil’s hand doesn’t move back from the side of Dan’s face. He lets it rest there drawing circles in Dan’s skin. Phil’s warm and his hand blocks out most of the dim light. Dan imagines the circles, spiralling on his skin, meeting and linking over and over again. In his ears, Thom Yorke wails about the ocean blooming. He finally falls asleep in pale blue warmth.

***

Daniel James Howell wakes in red freeze. When asleep he could doze through hurricanes. It usually took hours for sleep to take him but when it did it latched its wicked hooks into him and wouldn’t let him go.

When he awoke, he had slept through more than a hurricane. Phil’s side of the bed was empty, sheets haphazardly tossed to the floor as though he had gone somewhere in a hurry. The cat was nowhere to be seen. There were mumbles from the bathroom several doors down but most shocking of all, there was blood on the floor.

It was true blood, not fake. They smell different. There was no whiff of honey and corn syrup. This blood was bitter iron. It painted the floor of Phil’s bedroom in circles. Twisting and linking together, over and over again like pacing. In the hallway, there were bloody footprints beside skidded smears of red.

Dan leapt from the bed in one swift motion, trying to shake the sleep from his limbs, needing his wits to understand what it was he was seeing. He was an idiotic character in a horror film, following the trail of blood and muffled whispers into his bathroom. He opened the door his eyes instantly locking with a lumping mass of body curled into his and Phil’s bathtub before trailing to PJ, his body perched on the sink top, face black, blue and swollen. It took Dan longer to find Phil, he was standing in the far corner of the room, closest to the shower his jaw set, eyes wide.

What the hell had Dan just walked into?


	17. Hamartia

**_Year 2- February to April_ **

_Hamartia. A word sprung from the Ancient Greeks to propose the theory that all great heroes in great epics also had a tragic flaw that would inevitably lead to a great downfall. But how could this concept translate to the real world? Achilles had his heel but Frank from accounting was never dumped in the river Styx so what was his hamartia? Was it greed, envy or something far less definable? Not all real-world stories were tragedies. Though, any life could be turned into a tragic story. It just depended on where you ended._

_If this story were to end the day after the sleepless night then it would indeed be a tragedy. This is where the world falls apart. This is where the universe implodes._

_The three-legged cat, once Sir Constantine Caviar, then Puss, now Ace didn’t want to be up to this part of the story. He wished they could get ahead of themselves, skip over this part and drift to a time that was better but he was still getting ahead of himself. Now he quivered under his owners’ bed, watching and listening to the world tear itself apart._

_***_

Phil awoke to the sound of light knocks turning frantic. When looking at the time he realised he had been asleep for less than an hour. It was just before seven in the morning. Dan was fast asleep beside him, though ‘beside’ was a relative term. Dan’s face was burrowed into the crook of Phil’s neck, his shoulder half on Phil’s chest. Phil liked it. Somehow in sleep both he and Phil had lost their earbuds, now tossed to the floor with Phil’s phone. In his sleep, Dan’s lips parted slightly, breathing both softly and deeply. Phil took the sight in for a moment too long before the frantic knocks came again. Phil couldn’t see the cat anywhere.

He worked hard at peeling himself from Dan without waking him. He looked younger in sleep. He looked like he had the night they had first met. The first-time Phil had been idiotic enough to let him sleep over. Phil brushed a few curls from the man’s face before making his way to the front door. He looked through the peak hole, hoping it was someone he could just tell to shove off so he could get a few more hours of sleep. It was PJ. He opened the door.

It wasn’t PJ that startled Phil most, though his friend, wide-eyed, bruised and caked in blood was a part of it. It was the body, limp and oozing blood from some nondescript location hitched over PJ’s shoulder that really set him on edge. He could feel a nervous and confused laugh bubble at the pit of his stomach, unsure how to react to what he was seeing. There was so much blood.

PJ ushered himself into the house, saying nothing- or maybe he was saying something and Phil couldn’t hear him, his ears were ringing. PJ must have been talking because when Phil had enough strength to remind himself he had to breathe, PJ’s voice came in a flustered flurry of nonsensical mumbles.

“I did… he wasn’t supposed to… I didn’t know what to- he just, and I couldn’t…”

Phil would have better luck understanding Spanish. Phil tried to slow his mind, tried to assess the situation. Amongst the blood and mass of clothes PJ’s hand, which wasn’t busy supporting the man, was buried in the man’s side, covered in blood. It looked as though that was the biggest issue of that moment. Phil didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t good under pressure. He felt an anxiety attack coming on, gripping vice-like at his throat. He didn’t have the time.

“We need to call an ambulance,” Phil choked out, feeling as though that was their best course of action but PJ shook his head frantically.

“No, he said not to- we were… if you do we’ll be fucked. He- shit he passed out… when did that happen?” The last bit was mumbled softly, more PJ talking to himself than Phil.

Phil then realised he knew that sandy brown hair, even if the man’s face was slumped over, he knew. Bertie, it was Bertie. What the hell had happened? Phil was torn, knowing that to work out what was going on and how best to deal with it, he would need to get PJ to talk but with a man possibly bleeding out in his and Dan’s apartment, and PJ adamant they couldn’t take him to a hospital he needed to work out how to stop the bleeding.

“Take him to the bathroom, we've got a first aid kit in there. You have to tell me where he’s hurt.” PJ did as he was told, seeming to hardly be able to stand himself.

Phil was surprised at how quickly he had formulated some kind of plan, how he could manage to stay level-headed enough for PJ to trust him. Saying he was freaking out would be the understatement of the century. He was trembling violently as he followed PJ down the hallway and into the bathroom. All he wanted to do was crawl back into bed with Dan, hoping this was all a bad dream.

Phil didn’t say it much, didn’t know how to say it but Dan always comforted him, always calmed him. Even when Dan wasn’t trying, he calmed Phil. In the mornings, he smelled like peppermint toothpaste and soap. At night, he smelled of nutmeg coffee and peach shampoo. He was always warm. He always felt like home. When he felt like his world was coming down around him, he wanted nothing more than to crawl under his familiar covers with Dan and stay there until everything was better or the world burned around them. Phil didn’t have time to reflect on this revelation, he filed it away for another time, another place. With a deep breath, he entered the bathroom.

PJ lowered Bertie into the tub, a faint groan escaping from the man’s body. Phil couldn’t work out if he was conscious but at least he was alive. PJ’s knapsack also fell from his shoulder, an old camera and some notepads fell from it. PJ kept his other hand lodged just below the bottom of Bertie’s ribcage. Phil dared to come closer, confirming what he feared. There was a large and gaping wound in the man’s side. Phil wasn’t an expert, nothing like it but he had seen enough crime shows and done enough research for his films to feel somewhat confident concluding the man had been stabbed.

Phil spun on his heels, quickly finding the first aid kit, opening it and looking with wide eyes at what he had to work with. He had no clue what to do. Could he just Google ‘how to fix a stab wound’, he’s sure there would be a Wikihow article on it. He was the wrong person to be put in this situation. He pulls a towel from the wrack, at first attempting to pass it to PJ but soon realised he wasn’t responding. He was in shock. Phil was in over his head.

He gently wedged the towel between PJ’s hand and Bertie’s wound, quickly watching the towel turn from white to deep brownish red. Phil then helped PJ push down harder against the wound, hearing a shaky gasp escape Bertie’s body. He was awake, for the moment.

“Keep the pressure on it… I’ll be back,” Phil gasps out before rushing back to his bedroom.

Dan is still fast asleep. Phil thinks about waking him but he can’t bring himself to do it. He still has the absurd hope in the back of his mind that he can fix the whole situation, clean the blood from their carpet and pretend the whole night never happened. He grabs his phone, searching up what he should do, reading everything he can on the matter at lightning speed, not sure if he is even able to take in the information. He paces in circles, still trembling, there is blood on his hands, on his phone. All the articles said he should have worn gloves, as did common sense but at that moment, it had been the last thing he could think of. Most sites just said it was a waiting game from there, keep pressure on the wound, bandage it, wait for it to stop bleeding, add ointment. He tried to convince himself it was simple.

He headed back to the bathroom, putting on gloves this time, switching the bloody towel for a new one. He was bleeding less. That was good, wasn’t it?

Time passed in a blur, Phil hardly remembers what he was doing, feeling as though he was working on autopilot. It took another half hour and another slaughtered towel for the bleeding to stop, or slow enough to place on a plaster and bandages. Sometime after he had ended up in the kitchen getting a glass of water to pass around between PJ and Bertie who was now coming in and out of sleep. Phil remembered giving him something from the medicine cabinet, whether they were painkillers or sleeping pills he couldn’t remember.

Phil had attempted to help PJ, leading him to the sink and scrubbing the dried blood from his hands. At first, it came off in deep brown flakes before turning red and smearing with the addition of water. Phil watched it stain the sides of his sink red. He tried not to look at it, tried to pretend he was somewhere else entirely. Phil attempted to get an explanation from PJ but he had gone stone silent. Eventually, he had to give up.

When Phil closed his eyes he still saw the blood. For a terrifying moment, he wondered if it was on the insides of his eyelids. After all, it was on his hands, wedged under his fingernails, matted in his hair, sunk between the grit of his bathroom tiles. Bile pushed up his throat at the thought. Blood was like glitter or sand, once it entered a place it never really left.

Phil and PJ now stood on opposite sides of the small bathroom, both silent both curled into themselves. Phil’s eyes stayed locked on Bertie’s body, making sure he was still breathing. The whole room smelled of iron and vomit. He couldn’t remember throwing up and didn’t recall seeing the other two do it either but his brain was so scattered it didn’t surprise him. All the while, PJ’s eyes stayed locked on the contents of his knapsack. His eyes were glazed over, somewhere between crying and not. When he finally did speak, Phil felt as though someone had dumped a bucket of cold water over his head.

“I filmed it. I didn’t help him I just- filmed it.”

**_***_ **

While Daniel James Howell and Philip Michael Lester were having a sleepless night, PJ was doing the same. His world was falling apart piece by piece. He was just trying to convince himself he was still a good person.

People always talk about secrets as though they are these rare and fascinating things, that if you have them it’s as though you are the keeper of some otherworldly treasure. This wasn’t the case for PJ. His secret felt like bile, bubbling away at his insides, eating away at parts of him he hadn’t realised existed until they were gone. PJ had time to reflect on his secret as the train slowly swayed beneath late-night London.

He would do anything to achieve his dreams. He didn’t want the fame or fortune that most people perceived he did when he told them he was a filmmaker. He wouldn’t mind those things if they came but they were not the end goal. He poured bits of his soul into the things he made, whether it was his films or the sketches he created, within all the characters he shaped there were parts of him he hadn’t known existed. Within creating, he discovered new parts of himself.

He always wanted to be more than what he had seen others in his field do. Maybe that’s why fame didn’t tempt him as much as people thought it would. He wanted to push the boundaries of ‘normal’, shape new ideas, create new things. He did, however, want what he created to be seen. He wanted to make people feel something. He would rather have ten people be touched by what he made than have hundreds watch his work but feel nothing. Maybe that’s why he never cared too much about big festivals. But they were a way to get your foot in the door. He began to think he was going about things all wrong when he started talking to Bertie Gilbert again.

Bertie Gilbert was an eccentric in a manner similar to PJ but Bertie Gilbert was a somewhat known name. He had several film awards under his belt and was even having a film shown at Sundance. He also made sure to make at least one horror film a year to place into Frightfest, just to piss PJ off. Bertie Gilbert thought horror films were, ‘boring and predictable’. So, maybe PJ needed a foot in the door. When Bertie offered to be this foot after their lecture in avant-garde and arthouse film, PJ had been apprehensive.

“I need some help with this film I’m making and I know how to get your films seen by the right people. You scratch my back, I scratch yours mate. Easy.”

Easy was a relative term but PJ had agreed and he was still paying for it.

***

**_February_ **

PJ had never been to the part of London Bertie had instructed them to meet, which only caused the suspicion bubbling in the pit of his stomach to grow. It was the suburbs, tiny little brick and stone buildings stood in the same place they had stood for the last ten decades. The old streets, however, were lined with new cars parallel parked and tightly packed over every free inch of road. PJ hated the suburbs.

He reached the address given to him. It was a small park nuzzled between a nursing home and gated community. Bertie was nowhere to be seen. Typical. PJ didn’t know why he had expected something better from the man he had been leering at for the past few years.

Upon closer inspection, PJ realised there was a man standing at the very edge of the park, body propped against a bench. He was slightly younger than PJ. Something about him looked deliberate. His face mirrored the slight confusion sparking on PJ’s face before morphing into something twisted and wicked. It happened in the space of a breath, the world seemed to shift and the man ran at him. PJ’s arms were up in a defensive stance before the man could reach him.

He landed a solid but sloppy blow which thudded against PJ’s forearm. It was enough to bruise but not enough to break. PJ used the other man’s force against him, moving slightly to the side, watching him pitch forward, nose-diving into the dirt. When the man looked up his nose began to gush. At this, he leapt back in horror but the other man took hold of his foot trying to yank him down. PJ kicked out without thinking, landing one solid blow to the stomach, winding up for another when a familiar twisted cackle called out from the opposite end of the park.

“Cut!”                                                                             

Bertie Gilbert, camera in hand jogged over as though to break up the scene but it was already over. PJ was frozen in confused horror while the man on the ground had sat up slightly, letting out a throaty scoff, cupping his still bleeding nose, cradling his stomach.

“Good fucking shot mate,” The unknown stranger complimented.

**_April_ **

PJ felt the train shift to a stop, shaking him from his thoughts as he exited The Underground and followed his phone’s directions, leading him to an address Bertie had given him. He knew the area this time, it was close to Dan and Phil’s apartment. Bertie was waiting for him, sandy blonde hair windswept, glasses slightly askew, clothes looking as though he had fallen out of the 1970s.

“Tonight, are you filming, or am I?” PJ asked rummaging through his knapsack for an old VHS style camera.

He had taken it from Phil’s apartment before the other man had moved. It had been his at one point, he thought. So, he didn’t feel too bad about taking it back. It had just been collecting dust anyway. PJ had never seen him use it. On this night, Bertie had insisted they use an old camera. They wanted the footage to look ‘authentic and raw’.  It was chunky and impractical but PJ didn’t feel as though he had much say in what they did.

“Filming.”

**_February_ **

“What the fuck were you doing?” PJ gasped when he found his tongue.

“Filming,” Bertie had replied with a sly smile, brushing dirt from the collar of PJ’s coat.

“And what’s he doing?” PJ indicated to the younger boy, now tipping his head back seeming to ignore the two as though the strange events which had occurred were completely normal.

“Exploiting a loophole in school systems by getting beat up enough to look real, going to the hospital to get a medical certificate and filing for a later date to sit his exams due to psychological damage or whatever…” Bertie spoke these words without the levity they deserved.

PJ looked to the younger man, as though checking to see if that ridiculous idea was true. The boy shrugged.

“The exams on the same day as a Kendrick Lamar concert, that’s fucked.” PJ had entered the twilight zone.

“And why were you filming it?” Bertie was reviewing the footage on his camera, looking uninterested.

“You like horror movies, right? Think _Cannibal Holocaust_ shit. All movies do fake bullshit fighting, it’s more like a dance than real fighting. Everything is so fake. Real horror, real blood. In your face gore and emotion. That can’t be replicated.”

PJ felt his dread bubble to the surface.

“I haven’t watched it, I’m not a fan of killing animals.” Bertie looked up, eyes rolling.

“I’m making art, not murdering animals. Think Fight Club with real violence, that’s all. Everyone in the film wants to be in the film. It’s a think piece on society, toxic masculinity and stuff. Think about it. Film and media glorify violence, but real violence? No one wants to see that. So that’s what we give them. In your face reality. It circulates conversation, controversy. The media loves controversy.”

Bertie’s words made too much sense to PJ. He felt himself slowly being won over. After all, isn’t that what he wants to do, push boundaries, make people feel something? But then again, if the violence was orchestrated, even if the blows were real, how realistic could it really be? PJ didn’t know how far Bertie was willing to take the concept. He didn’t know if he could be the voice of reason for Bertie that Phil was for him.

“I need someone else to film for me as well. It’s going to hurt my pride to say but you’re not too shit at making films. Help me with this one thing and I’ll show your stuff to people who can put you on the map.”

PJ didn’t have a choice, did he? He was in it now. He had seen too much. He wanted people to see his films more than anything. He was driven, determined no matter the cost. That was his hamartia.

**_April_ **

“Keep that camera on the guy over there. I said I’d give him fifty quid for this so it better look good,” Bertie instructed in a low whisper to PJ as the two stepped into a back alleyway. They couldn’t exactly film in the open.

“Are you sure about this guy?”

Everyone else they had used had been random university kids looking for an easy out of exams or work. This man was heavy set and in his forties. He gave PJ a bad feeling, one he tended to trust.

“Careful, I might think you actually care about me,” Bertie warned removing his glasses and handing them to PJ.

“Nah- but if anyone’s going to fuck up your face I have dibs.”

“Just shut up and film it.”

What happened next was a blur. Bertie had only hit the man once, a solid blow to the jaw before chaos ensued. PJ stood frozen, watching as the other man’s body was flung about the alleyway and pushed face first into the concrete again and again with the rhythmic thud of a kick drum. Something had shimmered and caught PJ’s eye. It was a knife, he wasn’t meant to have a knife. In the hurry of taking Bertie’s wallet from his pocket, the brawny man had forgotten entirely about PJ, mostly shrouded from view.

It was only when he was finished did he notice PJ. All at once it felt as though a truck had hit him. The man barrelled through him, shoving him to the side his face colliding with the concrete. For a while, he just lay there.

PJ hadn’t been able to do anything. He had been frozen in fear. There was someone dying in front of him and all he had been able to do was film it.

***

“What do you mean you filmed it?” Phil hesitated to ask, but before he could get an answer, the bathroom door cracked open. After a beat, Phil’s eyes locked with Dan’s both as startled both as confused.

Dan should have addressed the elephant in the room, or in this case the possible dead body. He should have asked what had happened to PJ’s face, asked why their apartment suddenly looked as though it belonged in the Cy Twombly section of the Tate Modern. These are all the things he should have asked but he looked at Phil and it didn’t matter.

“Are you okay?” Dan questioned.

In his ears, his own voice sounded strange. There was an intensity he had never heard before. There was blood on Phil’s forearm and his face. Logically Dan knew it belonged to the body, the thing he should be far more concerned about but that didn’t stop a pang of fear from gripping his chest.

Phil nodded his head, unable to speak. His lip trembled. Dan took his wrist, removing the blood-soaked gloves from his hands and led him out into the hallway only wanting to remove Phil from the situation.

“Talk to me, can you tell me what happened? Are you hurt?”

Dan’s eyes and hands were busy inspecting the other man’s body, trying to find any signs of trauma. Giving up Dan’s hands cupped Phil’s face attempting to get him to really look at him.

“I don’t know,” He whispered before pitching forward, burying his face in Dan’s chest clutching him tightly.

Dan didn’t question it. He wrapped his arms around the other man trying to quiet him. Beneath all the trauma holding Phil felt right. He buried his face in the man’s hair trying after a long moment of silence to coax what little information Phil knew from him. The body was Bertie Gilbert. He had been stabbed and PJ had filmed it.

Dan waited for Phil to calm down before leading him to their lounge room, sitting him down on the sofa and quietly whispering for him to stay there. He then went back to the bathroom. PJ was sitting down curled into himself near the tub.

“Do you think you can help me get him to a bedroom?” Dan asked unsure of how capable PJ was at the moment. After Phil telling him the other boy’s confession Dan wasn’t sure he could look at him the same way.

PJ’s movements were robotic but purposeful as he helped carry Bertie’s groaning body into Dan’s bedroom, laying him down there. PJ folded himself into the desk chair of Dan’s room. He didn’t seem to want to be too far from the body. Maybe he felt responsible. Maybe he was. Dan wished he had the slightest clue what was going on, how he could fix it.

On a whim, he moved to the bathroom, picking up the camera and inspecting it. The weight was oddly familiar in his hand, tugging at a memory Dan couldn’t recall. He sat down against the cold bathroom tiles, took a deep breath and pressed play.

***

PJ had filmed it. For what reason Dan couldn’t understand. He had only watched the first few minutes of the clip, fast forwarding through the rest wanting to see if he could discern the man’s face but the video ended abruptly with no answers, only raising more questions. PJ had filmed over an old tape.

Late-night London as well as all the blood and horror which came with it disappeared and was instead replaced with Phil’s old bedroom and Phil half in the frame, half out.

“Don't film me.” The Phil on camera groaned.

It was then Dan froze hearing his own voice mumble out a reply. He went pale white, having no recollection of this moment, not being able to place it. The camera then faced pale sheets as the conversation continued.

“Come sleep with me.” Dan’s past voice filled his present ears before the videotape cuts to black.

He didn’t remember anything. When had this happened? Had they slept together? Had Phil lied to him?

Dan didn’t think Phil was capable of lying to him. Dan had trusted Phil when he trusted no-one else in the world, not even himself. That was his hamartia.


	18. The Quiet in Chaos

**_Year 2- April_ **

_Li Jun was a first-generation immigrant from China, born in Xiangyang, though at the time it had been called Xiangfan. He remembered only fractions of the city he was born in. In his early twenties, he had moved to Shanghai to pursue a culinary career._

_His father hadn’t approved. He had been born into a time where conscription was still implemented and thought his son should do the same. He had always loved the west, it had been filled with possibility, with new ideas. Once in his early thirties, he had managed to accumulate enough wealth to move there._

_He had ended up in London, a city he had only read of in old novels. It was no longer filled with men in waistcoats, or women in corsets, riding in carriages and choking in smoke-filled streets. London was new and alive. He could walk down to Abbey Road and see where The Beatles had stood for their record cover. He had grown up and grown old in London._

_Li Jun, his wife and two sons now lived and worked in a building wedged between a coffee shop and an apartment building. The first floor of the building housed their traditional Chinese restaurant while the second was his home. It was a humble life, but a good one._

_He had been busy unpacking a new maneki-neko. It was a funny tradition. Though a hallmark of Chinese restaurants in the east and west alike its roots were lodged in Japanese tradition. He thought the past was interesting. How could one look to the future without first knowing the past?_

_One of his customer’s children had managed to snap the cat’s arm from its body. He wasn’t overly superstitious but he figured he should get a new one. His lucky cat had been untraditional in the first place, it was black, given to him by his father to ward off evil spirits as he thought that was the most appropriate when hearing his son was heading to the west. His father was too old fashion for his own good._

_The new cat was traditional, white and upon reading the underside of the cat he read it was made in India. He didn’t think something so little would trouble him so much. He huffed roughly and placed the cat back in its box, pulling out his old black cat, waving its decapitated arm in welcome._

_Bob Dylan had been right. The times they are a-changin._

***

Nobody tells you chaos can be quiet. Most people think of it as an orchestra of sound, a world on fire but chaos festers in the quiet places. In quiet, chaos festers like a small and growing lump of cancerous tissue multiplying and devouring until it is too big to ignore.

Dan puts the video camera back where he found it and made his way back into the hallway. In the room two doors down one man was stunned silent and shaking with guilt while the other writhed about in a world between sleeping and waking, between life and death.

There was still blood in the hallway.

Dan’s mind was creating all kinds of twisted mental loops trying to get around that fact. In the dimly lit hallway, it could be wine stains. It could be fake blood from a shoot. He could pretend his biggest worry was that his landowner wouldn’t give him back the deposit he had paid on the flat. With his eyes open he saw blood and with them closed he saw Phil’s old spare bedroom, saw it the way it looked on film.

The longer he shut his eyes the more fragments of faded memories came. Nothing was clear or crisp. They were all viewed as if he were underwater, looking upwards at the surface. They were indistinct and fluid. Dan’s knees buckle below him. He fell into an awkward half sitting, half crouching position.

He remembers another night, another hallway, just outside his door. He hears the distant throb of music, sees figures moving from a few doors down. One of the figures had paused.

“Are you okay?” In the present Dan opened his eyes.

He looks down to the end of the hallway and into the living room. Phil has spun around on the sofa, now looking at Dan, worry clear on his face.

“I feel like my head is falling apart from the inside.” In Dan’s mouth, the words taste old. They are stale but still applicable.

The worry on Phil’s face becomes more apparent. He stands, making his way to Dan’s side and tries to sit beside him in the hallway but Dan pulls away. He doesn’t want to be touched.

“At least if it’s only falling apart on the inside you won’t stain the carpet. It already has enough of those,” Phil’s words are both new and old to Dan.

Dan pulls his knees to his chest, burying his face from view. His breaths come out in fractured gasps. He knew then that there were parts to his and Phil’s story that he was missing. He didn’t know all the details but just knowing was enough to set him on edge. Phil’s hand falls onto Dan’s knee but he shoves it away, something he’s almost sure never happened the first time. History was re-writing itself in the worst of ways.

“if you were keeping a secret from someone would you tell them?  Even if it might ruin your relationship?” Dan asked aloud, unfolding his body, opening his eyes.

Phil’s face changed from worried, to confused, to hurt within a matter of seconds. He gave Dan his space but his body began to tremble slightly.

“What are you talking about?”

“What were you talking about when you wrote me that?” Dan shot back, standing now, moving to the other side of the hallway. Dan asked it like he already knew the answer so Phil didn’t speak. It had already been an emotionally harrowing morning, now was the worst time for revelations.

“Did PJ say something?” Phil asked, taking two attempts to reach a standing position, his body still trembling.

“He didn’t have to. Why the bloody hell does he have a video of you and I fucking about in bed on his camera and when the fuck was that from?” Dan’s voice grows in volume but breaks every few words.

Phil remembers the camera now, remembered why it had looked slightly familiar as it tumbled from PJ’s knapsack, forgotten about the time the object lived in his spare bedroom, remembered PJ leaving it there and forgetting to take it back to his own apartment. Phil hadn’t noticed him take it back but he must have. He remembered the footage, remembered lying in bed replaying it over and over after Dan had gone, remembered feeling like a creep for doing so before vowing to delete the footage but he never had.

So that was it then. Dan hadn’t been ignoring what had happened between them, whether scared, embarrassed or because he didn’t feel the same way, no. He didn’t remember it at all. Phil didn’t know what was worse.

“I thought you-” Phil attempts to grab Dan’s wrist, half to get him to stay, half to anchor himself. Dan pulls away.

“Get the fuck away from me,” He hisses through gritted teeth and makes a beeline for the door.

Phil knows he should follow but he is frozen. Dan always felt and displayed his emotions on a scale different from any other person Phil had ever encountered. When he was happy he was ecstatic. When he was sad he was miserable. When he was angry, the world around him quivered with his anger and when he was calm the whole world quelled. Phil had never been on the receiving end of Dan’s spiteful side. He had never felt the bitter sting of his words cut through himself like a million tiny knife pricks. Dan had always been capable of doing it, but never once, even in their rare disagreements had he unleashed his bitter side until this moment. The slamming door behind Dan feels like the severing of a limb.

Still, Phil feels bound to that apartment, knowing that at that very moment a man could be dying in Dan’s bedroom. Now wasn’t the time for this but god, Phil wanted to follow him. He wanted to find the words to explain away the hole he had dug himself in by staying silent for over a year but he couldn't. Instead, he watched Dan leave, watched the world turn silent again with the absence of him and in the silence, felt chaos swell around him.

***

Lost. That’s the best way to describe how Dan feels. At first, he would have used the word hurt but now all that hurt had melted away into confusion, into mistrust. He felt as though so much of his life had been an illusion, one which had just been shattered. What remained, Dan didn’t know.

He had wandered London like an undead tourist, finding himself passing all the places he and Phil had visited, moving through the city, picking at scabs of past part memories. He had walked in circles. At first, he had found himself on The Underground, heading to Phil’s old apartment. The trip jogged glimpses of memories Dan didn’t know he had. Then there were, of course, all the other memories, the constant back and forth journeys he and Phil had taken before living together, their mindless conversations.

_“We have to go now.”_

_“I don’t want to.”_

_“Come on.”_

_“No.”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Carry me.”_

_“I can’t carry you.”_

_“Can’t or don’t want to?”_

_“Bit of both, now come on or I’ll leave you.”_

_“You won’t. I can tell… Okay. Don’t look at me like that. Fine.”_

There was a conversation bouncing around in Dan’s head, a jigsaw falling into place.

He walked to Phil’s old apartment, looking at the footpath and remembering snow and a kaleidoscope of late-night London light. He set his eyes cold and determined on the quiet street as if it held answers. Dan wasn’t sure these streets could speak the story he needed to hear. Even if it jogged his memory, the street couldn’t untangle the twisted mess of nuances that had accumulated before and after that moment on the night which Dan could barely remember.

He was beginning to remember bits of the night, not all of it but enough. He wasn’t so much questioning what happened- though that was part of it, but instead what he wasn’t being told, why Phil hadn’t admitted that he was hiding bits of their past from him. He wondered for a moment if Phil even knew he was doing it. But he had to, didn’t he? He had to know.

Dan soon ended up turning back, stopping in at the Chinese restaurant Phil had lived off for his half-decade spent in London.

Dan didn’t know what he was looking for. He was chasing answers in the places Phil would normally be, as opposed to sitting down and talking to Phil. He was a coward an angry and confused coward.

A small old man stood behind the counter, as much a part of the building as the foundations. Day in, day out he was there. He always greeted Dan with a wide smile, seeming to know he was close to Phil his self-professed ‘favourite customer’.

“Would you like the usual?” He asked before Dan had the chance to walk in.

He didn’t know what he wanted. He shook his head.

“No, I was just…” The man gave him a knowing look.

“He hasn’t been around here today, comes around less since you’ve been showing up.”

The old man smirked with the ghost of humour as Dan came further inside, watching a black cat waving its nub of an arm. It was a quiet day, and Dan didn’t have anywhere he needed to be, both trying to think and trying to avoid thinking.

“Yeah, I’ve been trying to cook with him, he’s not as hopeless as he pretends to be. Sorry for taking away some of your business.” The man shrugged.

“It happens, my wife is a terrible cook. She won’t touch a stove without setting a kitchen on fire, but she handles all the finances. So, I can’t complain.” Dan chuckled weakly at that.

“Phil blew up our microwave by putting a tin can in it, we still have a burnt bean stain on our ceiling.” He had almost forgotten about that. Phil had apologised for two weeks straight.

“Sometimes we forget, our partners make up for what we lack but we also have to pick up the slack.”

It took Dan a beat to understand what the other man meant and when he did, he went bright red. Did he think-?

“We um… we aren’t-” The older man shook his head.

“It’s okay, my son is that way. I still don’t know the right words. How about I cook you up some spring rolls for the road? I’m sure you will find him soon.”

Dan didn’t have the heart nor mental capacity to correct the man.

“Yeah, okay. Thank you.”

***

Dan now sat, cradling his nutmeg latte at the coffee shop where he had first met Phil or thought he first met Phil, picking apart his half-eaten plate of spring rolls.  

Of all the places in the world, Dan had ended up here. There was no more portable library, no more blue inked notes shoved between book pages, no more Phil or PJ to sit beside him.

_“This café is about the halfway point between the train station and my place. They can brew up a good coffee and the place next door does the best Chinese takeout this side of London.”_ Phil’s old words bounced about in Dan’s mind. Had he known more than he let himself realise? Why had he started visiting the café in the first place? Had he ever visited the place before the week to end all weeks? He didn't think so. Maybe he was keeping things from himself.

Dan kept mindlessly balling up napkins, cursing under his breath, picking at the pits of his nails until small droplets of blood formed. Anyone watching him would think he was mental. He didn’t care. He needed something to keep his hands busy. He couldn’t sit still. His mind tossed and turned leaping from one confused conclusion to the next.

Dan closed his eyes in an attempt to steady himself and saw London in the snow, watched the world tilt as though he had fallen over, watched Phil appear. He remembered dancing of all things and lips. He remembered a kiss with Phil. It wasn’t the kiss Dan had initiated. Phil had been the one who started it. Phil had wanted to kiss him first. Was that true? Was Dan’s mind playing tricks on him? When had these memories come from, if that’s what they were? Maybe he was going crazy.  

He is broken from his thoughts by a figure sliding into the seat across from him. Dodie. She had the freshly rolled out of bed look, as though she had come over in a rush. Her hair was pulled into a messy high ponytail, her makeup kept to a minimal and clothes kept to classic London greyscale.

“Hey,” She spoke softly.

It had been a while since they had last truly sat down and spoken. It was half Dan’s fault for spending so much of his time with PJ and Phil, he spent less time with her now than he had when working a full-time job, but she had a hand in it as well.

Her time was occupied by trying to launch a music career, juggle a social life, working part-time as a youth counsellor and the rest was taken up by Sarah. Dan knew there was something far more complicated going on between the two girls that she wasn’t letting on and it hurt him that for once he was out of the loop, but then again, he had been keeping secrets too.

“How did you know I would be here?” Dan asked her. He couldn’t muster the usual light tone he would use with her.

“I had a hunch,” She answered vaguely, but Dan wasn’t having it. He rolled his eyes, and took a sip of his coffee, now grown cold without him realising.

“Phil called me. He had a hunch.” Of course.

“I didn’t know you two were so close.” Dan was surprised at the bitterness in his own tone.

“He cares about you. I care about you. We have a mutual interest.”

Dodie busies her hands crinkling and tearing sugar packets. Her face was creased with thought, as though she wanted to say something but didn’t know how to say it.

“Spit it out then,” Dan mused.

“I know you and Phil got into a fight and he wanted someone with you. I don’t know what happened, but I know he’s not a bad guy-” Up until a few hours ago Dan wouldn’t have argued.

He tried to think of a logical way to respond, to shape his words around his thoughts but at every turn, his tongue failed. He let his feelings take over, stopped trying to be eloquent and just spoke, words spewing out and piling on top of one another.

“He lied to me,” It was a broad start, but it caught Dodie’s attention. Her fingers paused, mid tear, sugar crystals spilling out on the table top.

“I don’t even know what he lied about. Not really, but the fact that he lied at all… it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, you know? I don’t know how I can look at him the same after and it wasn’t just something little, it was something pretty fucking big. I think we did something… together.”

Dan closes his eyes, feels himself falling asleep beside Phil, hears him speaking to Dan as he sleeps. He sounds so soft that all the words mumble and blur together. He opens his eyes and looks away from Dodie. Her brows are thick and drawn together in a hard line.

“I don’t know what he lied about and I don’t even fucking know how to feel about it because this one thing changes everything and if we did this then… he doesn't make sense. I don’t know if we are friends or… if he wants to be…”

Dodie was doing a good job at keeping up with his ramblings. They had been friends long enough for her to discern the meaning in his fractured sentences. Phil was the first person she had seen Dan really take interest in.

She had seen Dan with other women and been happy that he had someone, but there had always been a distance between him and them. He had liked the people he had been with before, Dodie wouldn’t argue that but he had never been in love with them. Dan had always described his past girlfriends to Dodie in simple adjectives. They were pretty, nice, kind, funny but they had never been anything more. He never had a spark when he talked about them, was always somewhat blasé with them. He had been content when they were there, fine when they were gone and never in any rush to see them again.

Dodie didn’t think you needed to be in love with someone to be with them, not necessarily. Sometimes you just needed someone and for a point in time they could be your person, but it wasn’t love. But amongst all of Dan’s rambling she could tell, he was in love.

“You’re in love with him,” She points out, feeling like Dan needs to know because sometimes he can be daft.

Dan had never put that feeling into words. He was too busy trying to wrap his head around other concepts. He had realised he was at least bisexual and had been so stuck on that that he hadn’t addressed the issue that was staring right at him.

He had plenty of small crushes on other men over the years, but he had always shrugged it off. They had never been enough to make him certain but instantly Phil had been. He wasn't just head over heels for Phil because he was a guy. He was so infatuated and shaken by Phil because he was in love with him. Before this moment, he wasn’t sure if he had ever been in love, so how was he meant to know how it felt?

He had been too busy trying to bury these feelings because Phil didn’t feel the same, he couldn’t because after all, Phil had been the one who pulled away from him but now he was remembering another time when Phil had kissed him first. So, what was the truth and more importantly could Dan admit to loving him if the whole thing was about to blow up in his face?

_‘Love is old slaughterer. Love is not blind. Love is a cannibal with extremely acute vision. Love is insectile, it is always hungry’_

“I do, and it fucking terrifies me,” He admits, hardly audible. Dodie’s hand falls over his own, giving it a small squeeze.

“Then sort it out, you idiot. You’ll never know if you never talk about it. If he really did lie to you then ask him why. If he doesn’t have a good enough explanation, just point him in my direction and I’ll give him what for.”

“Why do I feel like you’re on his side?” Dan huffed.            

“Because I have a feeling he’s a really good guy, he’s always checking on you.” For a moment Dodie paused as if deliberating whether or not she should elaborate on her point.

“Remember when you disappeared after my party and… you came back looking like a fucking mess- might I add?”

Dan merely nodded. He could forget most of that week, but the aftermath would always stick with him, the constant worried looks from all his friends, the calls at all hours of the night making sure he was safe and that he was okay. It was caring but it was also suffocating.

“A few days after Phil showed up at my door asking if you were okay. I don’t know what happened between you two in that week but the guy who came to my door really cared, he didn’t seem like the type to take advantage of you, to lie without having a reason. I don’t think he meant to hurt you… probably the opposite. I think he was just scared to talk to you. You know Phil hates confrontation. I think you two just need to talk through it.”

This information should surprise Dan, but it didn’t he was numb to surprise after the morning he had. Everything he once thought had been rewritten and he was left scrambling to discern fact from fiction. What had gone on between him and Phil? What did that mean for everything that had come after? What had PJ and Bertie done? What did all this mean for life thereafter?

He hated when Dodie was right. He needed to swallow his pride and go back into the fray that was his apartment. He wanted to hide somewhere dark where no one could touch him and forget everything, but he had learnt in recent years that you always had to come crawling out of that and life was always harder to rebuild if you gave it time to fester untouched. He had already left this too long. He needed answers, even if they weren’t the answers he wanted.

“Sometimes you’re too wise,” Dan managed, letting out a shaky laugh.

Dodie gave a nonchalant shrug and stood, pulling Dan up into a tight hug. He could feel her realigning his false ribs with the force of her grip.

“Only when it comes to people I care about,” She muttered against Dan’s chest a true smile crossing his face.

“Hey, Dodie?” Dan questioned, resting his chin on the top of her head. She hummed softly to show she was paying attention.

“I love you… no ro-mo.”

This earned a groan from her as she shoved herself back from Dan, laughing faintly and scrubbing her eyes.

“And you ruined it… but I love you too.”

***

Dan entered his apartment expecting to see the same quiet war zone he had left. It both was and wasn’t that. There was still blood on the carpet, on the bathroom tiles, circling Phil’s room, in the bathtub and on the top quilt of Dan’s bed but there wasn’t another soul in the flat. It was just Dan. On the benchtop sat a note written in blue and scratchy, scrawl.

_Dan, things got worse. I took the guys to the hospital. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything. I didn’t mean to hurt you I just didn’t know how to talk to you. If you’re still mad at me I understand but if you want to talk that’s where you can find me. I would really like to see you._

_P.S. I can’t find the cat._

***

Dan found Ace after a third lap around the flat. Along the way, Dan had tried to clean the worst of the blood, staining the pale grey carpet bleach white in splotches. It was better than blood. The cat was cowering under his bed. The stench of bleach had permeated through from the bathroom and hallway to this room. Dan had been about to wash his covers, debating with himself whether he was being helpful cleaning up the house or stalling from having to talk to Phil. He decided he was probably managing to do both.

There had been a soft, sneeze-like sound from under his bed. Dan peeked under, seeing the creature wide-eyed and agitated his tail flicking from one side to the next in jerky motions. Dan was about to add another scratch to his collection.

He crawled under the bed, extending a hand to Ace, watching him slink closer before burrowing himself into Dan’s arm. Dan pulled it closer, surprised he wasn’t lashing out and sighed deeply.

“It’s been a long day bud.” The cat looked up as he spoke, attentive.

“What do you say the two of us get out of here? I’ve got shit to do and I need moral support.”


End file.
